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THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
WILLIAM JAMES 



BY 

TH. FLOURNOY 

Professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the 
University of Geneva 



AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION 
BY 

EDWIN B, HOLT AND WILLIAM JAMES, JR. 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1917 






Copyright, 1917, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



Published Janaary, 1917 



• 



FEB 23 1917 



THE QUINN A BODEN CO. PRESS 
RAHWAY, N. J. 



>CLA45'5676 
i 



PREFACE 

In the spring of 1910 M. de Vargas, presi- 
dent of the Association chretienne Suisse d'Etudi- 
ants, conceived the idea of appealing to William 
James, whom he knew to be passing the summer 
in Europe, to address the Association at its 
next meeting in Sainte-Croix. The proposal 
might have seemed an ambitious one, but the il- 
lustrious philosopher received it very amiably and 
replied at once that he would be glad to come 
to Sainte-Croix, but must make his acceptance 
conditional on the state of his health when the 
time arrived. Unfortunately he was obliged, 
some weeks later, to give up the project because 
his health had taken a sudden turn for the worse. 
We now know only too well how rapidly from that 
time on his final illness developed. Leaving Nau- 
heim, whither he had vainly gone for relief, James 
crossed Switzerland and stopped for eight days 
in the early part of July at Geneva; but while 
there he was so ill that he was able to see only a 
iii 



iv PREFACE 

few of his friends. He spent the following month 
in England, consulting the most competent spe- 
cialists; then on the twelfth of August he sailed 
for America. He had been but a few days at his 
country house in Chocorua (New Hampshire) 
when, on the twenty-sixth of August, 1910, at the 
age of sixty-eight and one-half years, he died. 

The two following letters from William James 
to M. de Vargas will give a better idea than any 
words of mine of the friendliness and candor of 
this rare man, and of the cordial feeling which 
he always cherished for our Switzerland. 

Rye, Sussex, April 12, 1910. 

Dear Monsieur de Vargas: — 

« 

Your invitation naturally fills me with pride and 
pleasure, and were I in good health, I should imme- 
diately accept it for the sake of renewing my old 
acquaintance with the jeunesse studieuse of Vaud 
and Geneva. But I am at present quite ill; and un- 
less the course of baths which I am going to 
Nauheim to begin taking in May should change my 
condition very much indeed, it will not be possible 
for me, even in October (should I stay in Europe 
so long) to meet you and your Association at Sainte- 
Croix. 

Nevertheless I will not say " no " at present, but 
will adjourn the decision until July, when I will 



PREFACE v 

write to you again. So meanwhile you see that I 
accept your demand en principe. You ought, how- 
ever, not to delay on that account your other pos- 
sibilities of guests. . . . 

I thank your Committee most cordially for doing 
me this honor and remain fraternally and sincerely 
yours, 

Wm. James. 

Bad-Nauheim, June 2, 1910. 
Dear M. de Vargas: — 

I receive your kind letter of May 28th this in- 
stant. . . . Unhappily, it will be quite impossible 
for me to accept. My health gets worse instead of 
better, and the diagnosis, now sharply festgestellt, 
of enlargement of the aorta, makes it obligatory for 
me to avoid every occasion of excitement and fatigue. 

I deeply regret not to be able to be among you and 
share in Swiss enthusiasm and Swiss youth. But 
there is no way! Believe me, with heartiest good 
wishes and hopes for the success of your meeting, 
very sincerely yours, 

Wm. James. 

Thus deprived of the unparalleled good-for- 
tune to which it had been looking forward, the 
Association chretienne d'Etudiants requested me 
to take the place left vacant on its programme. 
Other obligations caused me to hestitate for some 
time; but when the dire news of James's death 



vi PREFACE 

arrived, I felt that I ought not to decline the 
invitation which, sadly enough, lay before me. 
It seemed a sacred duty to accept this oppor- 
tunity of evoking for my young hearers the mem- 
ory of the man of genius, the rare spirit, and 
the true friend who had been so suddenly taken 
from us. And hence this present discourse, 1 im- 
provised all too hastily, on the Philosophy of 
William James. On revising it several months 
later for publication, at the instance of the Com- 
mittee of the Association, I have become still 
more thoroughly aware of its incompleteness and 
its imperfections. Yet to correct it as I should 
wish would be quite beyond my present ability; 
and moreover, to aim here at the utmost critical 
precision would be to sacrifice the one merit 
which, perhaps, this study possesses, — namely, its 
unpretentiousness, its easy pace, its popular and 
non-academic point of view. Accordingly in pre- 
paring this volume I have preserved the arrange- 
ment and divisions, often even the none too well- 
turned phrases, of the original discourse. On 
the other hand I have enlarged it considerably 

1 Delivered at Sainte-Croix, on the eighth of October, 
1910. 



PREFACE vii 

and perhaps too much, in order to develop cer- 
tain points which were in the lecture very briefly 
touched on if not quite omitted. I have also re- 
printed, as an Appendix, my review of James's 
work entitled The Varieties of Religious Ex- 
perience. This review first appeared in the 
Revue Philosophique, and may be useful, as a pre- 
liminary appreciation, to readers of that now 
famous work. 

I could wish that this little volume, in spite of 
its defects, might awaken in some of my young 
readers the desire to become more directly ac- 
quainted with the writings of a thinker whose 
whole philosophy seems to appeal especially to 
youth, so charged is it with energy, courage, and 
frankness, and with buoyant devotion to those 
ideals which ever guided his life and conduct. 

Th. Flouenoy. 
Florissant, near Geneva, 
June the first, 1911. 



CONTENTS 



Preface 

The Philosophy of William James 

I Artistic Temperament 

II Early Environment 

III Rejection of Monism 

—IV Pragmatism 

V Radical Empiricism 

VI Pluralism 

VII Tychism . 

VIII Meliorism and Moralism 

IX Theism 

X The Will to Believe 

XI Summary and Conclusion 



Appendix 

Review of James's volume " The Varieties 
of Religious Experience." 



PAGE 

iii 

1 

3 

13 

31 

4s4s 

68 

100 

110 

121 

134 

166 

189 

217 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM 
JAMES 

Gentlemen : 

It was just half a century ago — that is in the 
summer semester of 1860 — that the Genevese Sec- 
tion of the Societe de Zofingue elected to its mem- 
bership a yoi*ng American named William James, 
who was then attending the course in science and 
arts at our ancient University. Not many 
months later he withdrew, in order to return to his 
own country; and some years afterwards, since 
nothing further had been heard from him, he 
was entered, if you please, in the printed catalogue 
of former Zofingiens, as a " merchant " of New 
York. 1 

William James a merchant! A more absurd 
qualification could hardly have been found. For 

1 Catalogue des Membres de la Section genevoise de la 
8ocUt4 de Zofingen. Geneve, 1861, p. 31. It here appears 
that William James of New York, student of philosophy, 
was hospes perpetuus of the Section, from April 4th to 
July 27th, 1860, during the presidency of Aug. Chantre; 
and that on withdrawing he received the honorariat. 



2 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

merchants are little addicted to cultivating pure 
science or delving among the riddles of the uni- 
verse; and William James did nothing else. He 
became a philosopher, after having been so far 
a scientist as to have taught both anatomy and 
physiology at Harvard University. But he was 
eminently a moralist and never left out of account 
spiritual values. He had the warm heart and 
generous soul of a philanthropist, in the best sense 
of the word, loving humanity at large and cherish- 
ing for it the dream of a philosophy which, for 
once, should not stifle and hinder it, but which 
should help it on toward a fuller life. And he 
loved his fellow-men no less in the concrete, and 
was quick to help them in the material as well as 
in the moral sense. Unfortunate colleagues, dis- 
appointed and discouraged students, any derelicts 
whom chance threw in his path, he aided ; and no- 
body knows how many persons he has relieved, 
and helped to reconcile with their lot in life. 
Lastly, James possessed a sensitive artistic tem- 
perament, something which, as you all know, is as 
remote from commerce as anything well could be. 



ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 

William James was an artist by virtue of an 
originality and perfection of literary style which 
made him one of the most brilliant writers of his 
own country. But above all he was an artist in 
his extraordinarily vivid and delicate feeling for 
concrete realities, his penetrating vision in the 
realm of the particular, and his aptitude for seiz- 
ing on that which was characteristic and unique 
in everything that he met. I do not here refer 
to external and material realities (although it is 
true that James appreciated as few do the beau- 
ties of nature, and having a remarkable facility 
for drawing, he entertained for a time the idea of 
becoming a painter), for in the life of the soul 
he saw a still more mysterious and fascinating 
spectacle, and it is to the observation of this that 
he resolved to devote himself. He was a born psy- 
chologist and a psychologist of genius precisely 
because of this artistic insight, which in him, by 



4 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

a rare exception, was combined with the exact 
scientific spirit. 

Between these two turns of mind there is, as 
you know, a profound contrast; for the artis- 
tic mind looks at everything in its concrete par- 
ticularity and presents it as individual, while the 
scientific intellect analyzes, abstracts, and gen- 
eralizes. All science is general, as Aristotle said, 
and when it deals with particular objects it at 
once dissolves their particularity, analyzing them 
into elemental factors, classifying them and refer- 
ring them to general laws, until all their individu- 
ality is lost. But it is just this unique individual- 
ity, intact, immediate, and real, which is the ex- 
clusive interest of art. Now James's temperament 
led him to see that both these points of view are 
indispensable to a complete knowledge of mental 
life, and that psychic facts must be observed in 
their integrity, as indivisible pulsations of the con- 
tinuous " stream of consciousness " (to borrow his 
favorite expression) ; while at the same time they 
must be analyzed introspectively, and related to 
their extrinsic causes and conditions. One might 
reverse the familiar saying that " every landscape 
is a state of the soul," and say that for James 



ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 5 

every state of the soul was a landscape, in which 
he perceived with the eye of an artist the color, 
the atmosphere, and the indefinable charm of the 
whole; while at the same time his scientific eye 
distinguished the minutest detail and divined even 
the geologic structure of the earth beneath. This 
rare combination of two so diverse perceptive 
faculties gave to James's psychology a quality 
that was both spiritual, in that the most subtle 
manifestations of consciousness were never vio- 
lated, and at the same time searchingly physio- 
logical and even seemingly materialistic, in that 
the mechanical side of our psychic life, the organic 
and cerebral conditions, were attentively observed. 
But it is not of his psychology that I wish 
especially to speak to you to-day. 

This same artistic capacity, this fineness of per- 
ception, by means of which James, in analyzing 
his own subjective states was able to recognize the 
uniqueness and irreducible individuality of each, 
also enabled him to penetrate the recesses of other 
persons' consciousnesses far better than other 
psychologists have ever succeeded in doing. By a 
kind of admirable divination he fathomed with- 
out disturbing them, minds that were very dif- 



6 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

ferent from his own. Thus he was in touch with 
the moods and phases of the inner life of others, 
which to most of us are inaccessible, imprisoned 
as we are by the fixed barriers of our own egoism. 
Every work of James testifies to this aptitude, 
which besides being innate had been consciously 
exercised and developed, for seizing the living 
reality wheresoever it was to be found, and in per- 
sons howsoever different. So happy a faculty nec- 
essarily broadened both his personality and his 
philosophy far beyond the narrow individual hori- 
zon within which the devisers of philosophic sys- 
tems are too often confined. 

Little touches that testify to this breadth and 
penetration abound in James's life and in his writ- 
ings. It is not only other philosophers whom he 
endeavors intimately to understand, but also men 
of a mentality quite different from his own, be- 
hind whose abstract statements he sympathetically 
sees, and so realizes what the immediate ex- 
perience was which has inspired them. Even 
the most humble derelicts of our race are 
still of interest to him when he suspects some- 
thing in them which has been sincerely lived. If 
in a museum, for instance, he runs across a couple 



ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 7 

of simple souls engaged in the blissful contempla- 
tion of a mediocre canvas, instead of passing on 
with a smile at their naivete, he reflects rather 
that at least these untutored souls are experienc- 
ing the authentic aesthetic emotion which is very 
often quite missed by the learned critics in whom 
intellectualism has dried up the springs of feeling. 
If he meets one of those original characters whom 
good society treats disdainfully as a crank, be- 
cause he does not comply with accepted conven- 
tions, James instinctively feels himself attracted 
toward that person, not only with the curiosity 
of a naturalist for a rare specimen, a species 
which he must not miss, but with the sincere af- 
fection of a human being for his fellow-man, and 
with the interest of one experimenter in life for 
another participator in the same experiment. And 
we must note that in order to excite James's in- 
terest, it is not necessary for this other person's 
experience to present anything exceptional or sub- 
lime. However modest a human existence may be, 
however meagre or insipid it appears from the 
outside, it possesses nevertheless when seen from 
within its own intimate and peculiar quality, its 
unique importance, and a personal significance 



8 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

which most of us scarcely suspect where our fel- 
low-men are concerned, but which James always 
felt and endeavored to penetrate. 

For instance, once when traveling in North 
Carolina, he passed through a desolated region 
where the natural forest had been ruthlessly sac- 
rificed to make room for some miserable settlers' 
habitations. James reproached himself for his 
first feeling of revulsion at the melancholy spec- 
tacle, and blamed himself for not at once having 
had the sympathetic imagination to divine how 
much these objects, destitute as they were of 
beauty from the point of view of the tourist, rep- 
resented for the dwellers themselves by way of 
toil and vicissitudes endured, and security finally 
won. In short here a victory had been gained over 
nature. However much an ugly locality may 
strike us with its sorry aspect when we see it 
merely as passers-by, it may yet be that it has a 
very different message for those who live there 
and who have toiled, suffered, and perhaps tri- 
umphed; and it is this accumulated inner sig- 
nificance which we ought to discern, because it is 
that, rather than the cheerless outward aspect of 
the place, which constitutes its essential reality. 



ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT Q 

James has left us in this connection two admirable 
lay sermons on that intellectual and spiritual 
blindness which prevents our seeing into the soul 
of our neighbor whenever the conditions of his life 
differ at all from our own, and which makes us stu- 
pidly insensible to all that determines his valua- 
tion of things and his deepest interests in life. 1 

James's artistic sensitiveness to all the con- 
crete forms of psychical existence was not confined 
to the case of other men; it extended on occasion 
even to the dim consciousness of the lower ani- 
mals, in whom he sought to fathom the dull pulse 
of psychic life, and to divine what aspect the 
universe wore for their confused experience. From 
the inquiring look of his dog, from the vague ap- 
prehensiveness of cattle being driven to the 
slaughter-house, from the manifestations of pain 
in animals on the operating table, James sought 
to divine the way in which the mystery of things 
comes home to them. The quiet and more elusive 
states of consciousness as well as the brute joys 

1 Cf. James's two essays entitled " On a Certain Blind- 
ness in Human Beings" and "What Makes a Life Signifi- 
cant?" in the latter part of his volume Talks to Teachers 
on Psychology : and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals. 
New York, 1899, pp. 229 and 265. 



10 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

and atrocious sufferings, which make up the exist- 
ence of our humbler fellow-creatures, were all in 
his eyes fragments or pulsations of reality which 
no philosopher has any right to neglect. Even the 
lowly crab is summoned to the court of meta- 
physics by his inquiring genius, there to give its 
testimony in favor of the uniqueness of each in- 
dividual consciousness ; which in our passion for 
scientific generalization has been left so flagrantly 
out of account. " It is only a crab," says the 
naturalist, as he tosses it down among its fellows : 
" Excuse me, it is I," the animal would protest, 
and thus remind the philosopher that if the scien- 
tist supposes he has finally disposed of a living 
organism when he has pasted a label on it, or given 
it a place in his classification, he has quite missed 
the true inwardness of the situation. In reality 
every individual counts as itself and constitutes a 
unique and given fact whose existence one must 
recognize with a certain deference; nor may one 
flatter oneself that one can ever reduce it to a 
mere constellation of general laws or of abstract 
categories. 

I could multiply indefinitely these little indica- 
tions which show how supreme James was in dis- 



ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 11 

cerning that which is original and unique in every 
creature, and in attaining a sympathetic insight 
into that which constitutes for each its own pecul- 
iar being. But the most typical and masterly ex- 
ample which he has left us of this fine comprehen- 
sion of other minds that differed from his own is 
undoubtedly his celebrated book, The Varieties 
of Religious Experience. 1 This work has been a 
profound revelation to innumerable readers, ini- 
tiating some into mysteries of the inner life which 
they had never even suspected, and freeing others 
from the heavy yoke of dogma, while it has given 
to all a broader outlook and* a salutary lesson in 
toleration. There is indeed no realm in which dif- 
ferent souls are ordinarily more completely shut 
off from one another than in that of religion, and 
no field in which the mutual lack of comprehen- 
sion among human beings displays itself as more 
complete or more deplorable. James was the first 
person to succeed In pulling down these barriers, to 
understand and to make others understand the in- 
finite gradations of this peculiarly intimate order 
of experience. He has been in this field more in- 
fluential than any one else. In the midst of our 

modern society, so profoundly torn by religious 
1 New York, 1902. 



12 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

and anti-religious hatreds, he has set in motion 
a current of cooperation and mutual respect, a 
movement for human sympathy and fraternity by 
which all sincere persons may feel themselves en- 
couraged, and may, in spite of the diversity of 
their temperaments and personal convictions, lend 
friendly assistance to one another. 

We are not to conclude, however, from this 
openness of mind and gift of sympathetic intui- 
tion which made James take an interest in every 
aspect of mental life, that he was one of those 
over-refined aesthetes for whom humanity in its 
infinite variety is merely an absorbing spectacle. 
Without doubt to know all is to pardon all. But 
if James pardoned all, that is to say if he was 
infinitely indulgent to others (so long as they on 
their side were not intolerant or overbearing), he 
none the less appreciated differences of moral 
quality with rare subtlety, because he was him- 
self a positive and preeminently moral individual. 
He had his own ideals that were the product of 
his own inner experience, of his rare moral in- 
tuition, his personal view of life, in a word of his 
own philosophy. It is of this philosophy that I 
shall now try to give you a brief glimpse. 



II 

EARLY ENVIRONMENT 

The best way to understand a philosopher is to 
try to trace the genesis of his ideas to those envi- 
ronmental influences in which they developed. We 
may hope that some disciple or friend of James 
who was acquainted with the circumstances of his 
life and the growth of his thought will sometime 
give us a detailed study of this kind. I must here 
confine myself merely to the broader outlines. 

Two marked external influences, prior to his en- 
trance into the philosophical career, seem to me 
to have impelled William James in the direction 
toward which his own temperament and genius 
already predisposed him. 

The first was the influence of the home in which 
he grew up. It was a home in the old Puritan tra- 
dition and of unusual culture, both intellectual 
and moral. William's father, the revered Henry 
13 



14 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

James, 1 was a distinguished theologian and writer 
who, after a long intellectual search, finally 
adopted, with some reinterpretation, the doctrines 
of the great Swedish mystic, Swedenborg. He 
was on terms of intimacy with several of the most 
eminent thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, 
among others with Carlyle and Emerson, whom 
our future philosopher thus came to know person- 
ally. The character of this theologian and mys- 
tic presented a singular combination of humor 
and of austerity, of sparkling wit and of pro- 
found religious seriousness, which are not without 
their parallels in the character of William James. 
There is no doubt that heredity and paternal ex- 
ample have counted for much in the literary style 
and in the temperament of the son, as well as in the 
fundamental inspiration of his philosophy. It is 
not that he has preserved intact any of the the- 
ological ideas of his father, rather the contrary; 
but the dominant note has remained, which is per- 
haps characterized best by the word serious. 
The general impression given by William 

1 See The Literary Remains of the Late Henry Jamest 
edited with an introduction by William James. Boston* 

1884. 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 15 

James's philosophy as also by his personality is 
one of seriousness, of taking life seriously, and of 
meeting reality in a serious spirit, and if such ex- 
plicit phrases are found but infrequently in his 
writings it is because he never assumed the tone 
of a preacher. And to be " serious " does not 
here mean, as it so often does, to be tiresome, 
pedantic, or morose; nor does it preclude charm, 
imagination, vivacity, humor, and a kindly irony. 
But beneath these lighter qualities there is always 
the intimation that this life is no idle matter, but 
rather a brave enterprise in which risks are to be 
run and difficulties surmounted. 

This pervasive sentiment of the seriousness of/ \ 
life comes out in James explicitly in four doctrines 
— the liberty of man, the reality of evil, the exist- 
ence of God, and the possible salvation of the 
world (that is to say, in the final triumph of 
good) by the collaboration of man with God. 
These are the convictions that constitute the key 
to James's metaphysics — to his conception of the 
universe. A good theology, you may say, in 
which there is nothing very new. Perhaps, but 
once you agree that life is a serious enterprise, is 
it possible to introduce novelty in the matter of 



16 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

fundamental religious conceptions? James would 
have certainly said, No. And, besides, his aim 
was not to make a merely new and popular phi- 
losophy, but a philosophy which, built upon the 
rock of experience, should justify the secular con- 
victions of common sense and the time-honored 
moral intuitions of our race. The originality of 
William James does not appear so much in his 
cardinal beliefs, which he took from the general 
current of Christian thought, as in the novel and 
audacious method by which he defended them 
against the learned philosophies of the day. 

The second important influence of which I 
spoke, and which James met during his university 
course, was the illustrious zoologist, Agassiz, un- 
der whom he studied natural science. Let me 
quote here a few passages from a discourse which 
James delivered on Agassiz fifteen years ago, at a 
congress of naturalists held at Harvard. 1 These 
passages interest us for several reasons : firstly, as 

1 W. James : " Louis Agassiz," reprinted in Memories and 
Studies. New York, 1911. (The address was delivered on 
the 30th of December, 1896.) Louis Agassiz, born at Orbe 
in 1807, was called at the age of thirty-nine to a professor- 
ship in Harvard University, where he gave a great impetus 
to scientific research and founded the Agassiz Museum of 
Comparative Zoology. He died there in 1873. 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 17 

a public testimonial to a scientist which our own 
French-Switzerland may well be proud to have 
given to America; secondly, because we can rec- 
ognize in James himself almost all those qualities 
which he commemorates with admiration in his old 
professor ; and lastly, because we find very clearly 
shown here the main source to which he felt he 
owed his own method in philosophy. 

Agassiz " made an impression that was un- 
rivaled. . . . The secret of such an extraor- 
dinarily effective influence lay in the equally extra- 
ordinary mixture of the animal and social gifts, 
the intellectual powers, and the desires and pas- 
sions of the man. From his boyhood, he looked 
on the world as if it and he were made for each 
other, and on the vast diversity of living things as 
if he were there with authority to take mental pos- 
session of them all. . . . His passion for know- 
ing living things was combined with a rapidity of 
observation, and a capacity to recognize them 
again and remember everything about them, which 
all his life it seemed an easy triumph and delight 
for him to exercise, and which never allowed him 
to waste a moment in doubts about the commen- 
sur ability of his powers with his tasks." He 



18 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

was " recognized by all as one of those naturalists 
in the unlimited sense, one of those folio copies of 
mankind, like Linnaeus and Cuvier, who aim at 
nothing less than an acquaintance with the whole 
of animated Nature. . . . 

" He was a splendid example of the tempera- 
ment that looks forward and not backward, and 
never wastes a moment in regrets for the ir- 
revocable. . . . 

" The secret of it all was, that while his scien- 
tific ideals were an integral part of his being, 
something that he never forgot or laid aside, so 
that wherever he went he came forward as ' the 
Professor,' and talked ' shop ' to every person, 
young or old, great or little, learned or unlearned, 
with whom he was thrown, he was at the same 
time so commanding a presence, so curious and 
inquiring, so responsive and expansive, and so 
generous and reckless of himself and of his own, 
that every one said immediately, ' Here is no 
musty savant, but a man, a great man, a man on 
the heroic scale, not to serve whom is avarice and 
sin. . . . 

" Agassiz's influence on methods of teaching in 
our community was prompt and decisive — all the 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 19 

more so that it struck people's imagination by its 
very excess. The good old way of committing 
printed abstractions to memory seems never to 
have received such a shock as it encountered at 
his hands. There is probably no public school 
teacher now in New England who will not tell 
you how Agassiz used to lock a student up in a 
room full of turtle shells, or lobster shells, or 
oyster shells, without a book or word to help him, 
and not let him out till he had discovered all the 
truths which the objects contained. Some found 
the truths after weeks and months of lonely sor- 
row; others never found them. Those who found 
them were already made into naturalists thereby 
— the failures were blotted from the book of honor 
and of life. ' Go to Nature ; take the facts into 
your own hands ; look, and see for yourself ! ' — 
These were the maxims which Agassiz preached 
wherever he went, and their effect on pedagogy 
was electric. The extreme rigor of his devotion 
to this concrete method of learning was the 
natural consequence of his own peculiar type 
of intellect, in which the capacity for abstraction 
and causal reasoning and tracing chains of 
consequences from hypotheses was so much less 



20 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

developed than the genius for acquaintance 
with vast volumes of detail, and for seizing 
upon analogies and relations of the more 
proximate and concrete kind. While on the 
Thayer expedition, I remember that I often put 
questions to him about the facts of our new 
tropical habitat, but I doubt if he ever answered 
one of these questions of mine outright. He al- 
ways said: 'There, you see you have a definite 
problem; go and look and find the answer for 
yourself.' His severity in this line was a living 
rebuke to all abstractionists and would-be bi- 
ological philosophers. More than once I have 
heard him quote with deep feeling the lines from 
'Faust': 

' Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, 
Und griin des Lebens goldner Baum/ 

The only man he really loved and had use for 
was the man who could bring him facts. To see 
facts, not to argue or raisonniren, was what life 
meant for him; and I think he often positively 
loathed the ratiocinating type of mind. ' Mr. 
Blank, you are totally uneducated ! ' I heard him 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 21 

once say to a student who propounded to him 
some glittering theoretic generality. And on a 
similar occasion he gave an admonition that 
must have sunk deep into the heart of him to 
whom it was addressed. * Mr. X, some people 
perhaps now consider you a bright young man; 
but when you are fifty years old, if they ever 
speak of you then, what they will say will be this : 
" That X, — oh, yes, I know him ; he used to be 
a very bright young man ! " ' * Happy is the 
conceited youth who at the proper moment re- 
ceives such salutary cold water therapeutics as 
this from one who, in other respects is a kind 
friend. We cannot all escape from being ab- 
stractionists. I myself, for instance, have never 
been able to escape; but the hours I spent with 
Agassiz so taught me the difference between all 
possible abstractionists and all livers in the light 
of the world's concrete fulness, that I have never 
been able to forget it. 2 Both kinds of mind have 
their place in the infinite design, but there can 

*It may be added that this Mr. X. was William James 
himself, who had just proposed to Agassiz some Darwinian 
theories which had aroused his enthusiasm. The reader shall 
judge whether Agassiz's admonition bore good fruit. 

* Italics not in the original. 



22 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

be no question as to which kind lies the nearer 
to the divine type of thinking." 

" Agassiz's view of Nature was saturated with 
simple religious feeling, and for this deep but 
unconventional religiosity he found at Harvard 
the most sympathetic possible environment. In 
the fifty years that have sped since he arrived 
here our knowledge of Nature has penetrated 
into joints and recesses which his vision never 
pierced. The causal elements and not the totals 
are what we are now most passionately concerned 
to understand; and naked and poverty-stricken 
enough do the stripped-out elements and forces 
occasionally appear to us to be. But the truth 
of things is after all their living fullness, and 
some day, from a more commanding point of 
view than was possible to any one in Agassiz's 
generation, our descendants, enriched with the 
spoils of all our analytic investigations, will get 
round again to that higher and simpler way of 
looking at Nature." 

In place of the oyster or the tortoise shells re- 
ferred to here, put some example drawn from the 
phenomena of consciousness ; that is to say, trans- 
pose the whole passage from the domain of ex- 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 23 

ternal things, with which Agassiz and the nat- 
ural sciences are concerned, to the domain of 
internal experience, which is that of psychology 
and philosophy, and you will be able to apply 
almost textually to William James himself every- 
thing that he has just said to us about his old 
teacher in zoology. James too, we think, is one 
of those folio editions of our race, one of those 
beings of heroic type whose thought, carried 
away by the passion for truth, aspires to nothing 
less than embracing the sum total of living things 
and sketching in a philosophy in which all em- 
pirical data shall be taken into consideration and 
every human experience find its place. He was 
a man of infectious enthusiasm and of an ex- 
pansive and generous spirit that instantly won 
all hearts, and one who was forever looking for- 
ward to that future which our own efforts are 
destined to create. Far from being one of the 
dazed victims of learning and scholastic tradi- 
tion, he unceasingly demanded facts and for 
them turned his scrutiny to concrete reality, well 
convinced, as he says, that final truth is to be 
found only in the living flux of things. 

To come back to the point that here concerns 



24 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

us, that of the origin of the method which Wil- 
liam James was to follow in philosophy, the pas- 
sage that is italicized in the quotation given 
above shows us that he derived from his study of 
the natural sciences with Agassiz one distinction 
which remained forever afterward cardinal in 
his mind, and is indeed the dominant note through 
all his work even to the concluding sentences of 
his last lecture. 1 It is the opposition between the 
abstract way of thinking — that is, the purely 
logical and dialectical way so dear to philoso- 
phers, but which appeared to James paltry, 
hollow, and thin because too far severed from con- 
tact with particular objects — and the concrete 
way of thinking which nourishes itself on the facts 
of experience and which never leaves the humble 

1 Of. A Pluralistic Universe. New York, 1909, pp. 330, 
331. James declares himself satisfied if his lectures at 
Oxford have been able to impress " one point of method " 
on the tninds of his audience; and that point is that it is 
high time for philosophy to abandon the arid path of intel- 
lectualism and of logical subtlety, and in imitation of the 
sciences to betake itself to the broad and firm foundation 
of particular facts. And he concludes by hoping that his 
young auditors, by promoting more and more the concrete 
methods, will arrive at philosophical conclusions actually 
drawn from the " particulars of life." To characterize 
picturesquely these two methods, James was fond of the 
opposed epithets "thin" and "thick." 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 25 

but secure region of the tortoise shells and all the 
other positive data. The second method, that of 
Agassiz and of all scientists who are grappling 
with the real world, is for James the only one 
worth while, the only one that is really solid and 
" thick." He does not hesitate, you have seen, 
to compare it with the divine type of thinking, 
for it is evident that if all things are known by 
God or created by God, they must have been crem- 
ated atom by atom in every least detail and in all 
their immediate reality, and not by wholesale or 
at long range. 

I need hardly tell you that in condemning ab- 
stractionism — of which he also accuses himself, 
with the excessive scrupulousness of all fine na- ,, 
tures — James did not condemn abstraction, that 
is to say that necessary intellectual faculty for 
forming general ideas or concepts, without which, 
indeed, none of our sciences could exist, and with- 
out which our daily life would be reduced to the 
level of the life of animals. No one has insisted 
more than James himself, in various chapters and 
passages, on the indispensable role of abstraction 
in the formation of our thoughts. And no one 
has more practised it than Agassiz, of whom he 



26 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

tells us that " his genius for classification was 
truly marvelous " ; for one cannot classify with- 
out abstracting. Between abstraction (i.e., con- 
ception or intellection) and abstractionism (or 
intellectualism) there is for James all the differ- 
ence that there is between a normal function and 
the perversion of that function. The function of 
abstraction is to sum up in ideas or concepts the 
course of our experience in such a way as to be 
able to predict something of the future and to be 
in some degree master of it ; but it is not in order 
to get away from that concrete future and lose 
it wholly from view, as do so many theoreticians 
who lose themselves in the clouds of speculation 
and no longer bear the positive realities in mind. 
In order to forestall any misunderstanding on 
this point James often uses " abstractionism " or 
" vicious intellectualism " to designate that error 
which consists in taking our notions or defini- 
tions, which have been legitimately derived from 
the facts, in an absolute and grammatical sense 
which these facts by no means admit of, and so 
deducing conclusions that are " logical " but 
purely illusory. 

What would you say, for instance, if a con- 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 27 

firmed dialectician, on the strength of the dic- 
tionary definition of " cavalier " as " a horse- 
man," were to declare it contradictory and im- 
possible for a cavalier ever to go on foot? 
Common sense would see the absurdity at once 
in so elementary a case, but in the more hazy at- 
mosphere of metaphysics it is harder to see 
clearly, and this sort of error can be committed 
again and again without being detected. The 
celebrated sophisms by which Zeno proved the 
impossibility of motion, irrefutable as they are 
in pure logic, are of this order; and they show 
conclusively that the abstractionist's method, 
which juggles with concepts taken rigidly and 
absolutely, is incapable of grasping the concrete 
world in its fleeting and mobile reality. Yet it 
is in this concrete world that our daily life is 
unrolled and all our sciences are evolved. 

In short, what instinctively irritated Agassiz 
the scientist, and what James the philosopher 
consciously rejected as a matter of principle, was 
not general ideas or theories as such, for nobody 
can dispense with these, but itjvas those general- 
izations which soar away into the void and have 
not, so to speak, their feet on the ground; such 



28 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

theories, I mean, as are not attached to things 
that we can touch with our hands or see with our 
eyes or otherwise verify by some organ of per- 
ception; theories which fail to refer (to revert 
once more to our former example) to the oyster 
shell or the tortoise, the actual material of 
zoology, or, again, to the states of consciousness 
as they are immediately experienced and lived, 
the given data of psychology. 

This point is so important for the understand- 
ing of James's philosophy that I wish to illus- 
trate it by one more comparison. In his Voyages 
en zigzag Rodolphe Topffer often uses the terms 
" speculate " and " speculation," combining the 
usages in philosophy and business, to designate 
the act of venturing on some short-cut; and he 
takes the opportunity to poke a sly jest at those 
imprudent persons who in the hope of shortening 
their journey march into a cul-de-sac. And it is 
clear that a " speculation " would look extremely 
useless and futile unless it succeeded, unless finally 
the short-cut emerged again on the main road. 
And he justly calls that a " bad speculation " 
which does not bring the traveler out at his 
destination. Now it is in much the same way that 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 29 

James looks on theoretical speculation and its 
relation to concrete experience. All our ideas, 
hypotheses, and doctrines, in short every thing 
that is thought as opposed to that which is 
sensed, conceived as opposed to perceived, if they 
are to have any value or significance, must 
never be anything more than, as James said, a 
" short-cut," which leaves the broad highway of 
the immediately experienced facts only to rejoin 
it again at the goal, or at least farther along in 
that direction. In other words our thoughts, 
which form the conceptual domain, have no value, 
that is no truth, except as they advance us 
toward further concrete experiences and expedite 
our progress in the perceptual domain, in that 
surging current of events which constitutes 
reality. This formula, which sums up both 
James's pragmatism and his radical empiricism, 
sufficiently attests the impression made on him by 
his early contact with Agassiz. 

To recapitulate: In so far as the personality 
of a genius can be explained by environmental 
influences, we may say that William James at the 
beginning of his career, had derived from thd 
atmosphere of the parental home a moral earnest- 



30 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

ness which remained the permanent inspiration 
of his philosophy, and from the study of natural 
science a concrete habit of mind which tallied ex- 
cellently with his innately artistic temperament 
and which developed later into his two closely re- 
lated doctrines of Pragmatism and Radical 
Empiricism. 



ni 

REJECTION OF MONISM 

Let us now picture to ourselves the young 
William James, student of medicine and pro- 
fessor of physiology, with his unquenchable thirst 
for knowledge turning in his leisure moments to 
the field of philosophy, in the hope of finding 
there the key to the riddles of the universe. He 
finds himself from the outset surveying a legion 
of self-assured and rather blustering pontiffs of 
learning, each lauding his own system as the only 
legitimate one, the only one conforming to all 
the exigencies of reason; — an intellectual Babel 
which might well make one's head swim. Never- 
theless, upon looking more closely, one discovers 
that all these divergent doctrines agree in so far 
as to consider- the infinitely complex reality that 
surrounds us as the manifestation of some one 
unique principle from which all the particular 
phenomena follow of inevitable necessity. These 

31 



32 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

philosophies, in other words, are all deterministic 
monisms which vie with one another in asserting 
that the whole universe constitutes, in d'Alem- 
bert's famous phrase, " one single fact and one 
great truth." It is only when it comes to quali- 
fying this unique fact and supreme truth that 
modern metaphysicians cease to agree. 

Spinoza, their common ancestor, will tell you 
that fundamental reality is infinite Substance, 
self-caused and self-sustained, from which arise, 
as so many particular modes and by logical neces- 
sity, all the details of our experience, including 
our decisions and voluntary actions; which are, 
consequently, no more really free than the move- 
ments of a weather-vane in a capricious wind. 
For his antagonist, Leibnitz, the supreme prin- 
ciple is God who created all beings in a pre- 
established harmony in which the future develop- 
ment of each one is ordered in advance without 
possible deviation, like the ticking of a well-made 
clock. The materialists or naturalists, with their 
thousand shades of difference, as in Buchner, 
Spencer, Haeckel, Ostwald, et cetera, derive the 
whole cosmic process either from the shock of 
Atoms or from the differentiation of Matter or 



REJECTION OF MONISM 33 

else from the transformation of Energy, by a 
rigid mechanism which nothing can escape; so 
that everything that happens or ever will happen 
was already virtually contained in the primitive 
nebula, and an infinite mind (according to the 
fiction of Laplace) could from the very begin- 
ning have calculated the sequence of events in 
scecula-sceculorum with a mathematical certainty, 
merely by varying the time t in the universal 
formula. In place of the Matter or the Energy 
of these philosophers, Hegel and his disciples 
substitute its contrary, the Absolute Idea, which, 
however, amounts to the same thing; for it gen- 
erates the whole course of things with the inex- 
orable rigor of its dialectic, forever executing 
its eternal dance to the waltz-time of thesis, an- 
tithesis and synthesis. Schopenhauer, in turn, 
explains everything by the blind and fatal im- 
pulses of the Will-to-live; and von Hartmann 
by those of the Unconscious. Taine invokes the 
universal Axiom, which professes to be the ulti- 
mate fountain-head ; and Renan the Infinite Mind, 
which thinks all finite beings much as a novelist 
conceives his characters, and more or less by way 
of pastime. And so forth. 



34 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

You see that all these different hymns in cele- 
bration of the universe have the same refrain of 
monism-and-determinism. In all these varieties 
of metaphysics, whatever may be the essence of 
the First Principle or the nature of the necessity 
which it implies — whether logical, geometrical, 
mechanical, physico-chemical, or even psycho- 
logical, according to the idiosyncrasy of the au- 
thor — there appears always the same funda- 
mental conception, the old Oriental dogma 
of the One Being, the sole reality, immu- 
table and eternal, whose empirical variety 
is but the delusive appearance of a temporal 
unrolling. 

There is something ambitious and to the im- 
agination fascinating in this idea of the absolute 
unity of all that exists, of the iron hand of neces- 
sity gripping the entire universe and leaving no 
least play to the caprice of the individual. James 
never disputed the majestic simplicity of what 
Ke called the " block-universe " of monistic de- 
terminism. But the aesthetic advantages of this 
system did not succeed in hiding from him the 
gravity of its consequences from a moral point 
of view, namely, the impossibility of still taking 



REJECTION OF MONISM 35 

life seriously when one admits that everything 
that it presents, including our very personalities, 
is nothing after all but an illusion, and has 
neither reality, independence, nor value. How 
continue to see a difference between good and 
bad, true and false, just and unjust, in a world 
in which these things are at bottom identical 
and lay equal claim to being a manifestation of 
the one unique Being from which they both origi- 
nate? How have enthusiasm for the struggle 
and how suffer for a cause or an ideal, when we 
know that all our efforts will avail nothing ; when 
that which must be must be, and what is not to 
be is not to be, all owing to the inexorable power 
which is constantly producing the future from 
a past which virtually contained it? What is the 
use of striving to behave nobly or trying to 
better the world, if you admit that, strictly speak- 
ing, we can never act but are merely actuated, 
and that the course of the world is already pre- 
determined to all eternity in the bosom of the 
" primitive nebula " or of " Infinite Substance " ! 
All existence becomes, in short, a comedy 
— how often, alas, a tragedy— in which we, 
like marionettes in the hand of the " Absolute," 



36 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

play a role whose action we understand only as 
it unfolds ! 

Such considerations and others of the same 
kind, which tend to paralyze the will and dis- 
courage effort, have certainly not escaped the 
attention of partisans of monistic determinism; 
but they are consoled either by the theoretical 
beauty of their doctrine, or by the serene peace 
inspired in them by the contemplation of an ab- 
solute necessity presiding over events and so pre- 
cluding all remorse for the past and all anxiety 
for the future. As for William James, he was 
not the man to acquiesce so readily in the aban- 
donment of our instinctive aspirations. He was 
by nature too active, too imbued with individual- 
ism, to consent light-heartedly to be the mere 
sport of Infinite Substance or of primitive nebula. 
Above all, his sense of the poignant reality of 
evil and of human suffering was too keen for him 
not to revolt against a system which justifies and 
definitely consecrates them as the inevitable 
emanations of the " Universal Being." Unques- 
tionably, if the truth of this system were demon- 
strated, we should have to resign ourselves to it. 
But the self-assurance with which its advocates 



REJECTION OF MONISM 87 

lay claim to infallibility is scarcely a sufficient 
reason to make us accept their edict. Before 
submitting to such doctrines James asked for 
their confirmation, and soon learned that there 
was none save the personal prejudices and incli- 
nations of their authors. For the so-called ra- 
tional demonstrations upon which deterministic 
monism rests are, when closely examined, found 
to be but magnificent examples of a vicious intel- 
lectualism, because they consist in the arbitrary 
erection into a general dogma of the slight 
amount of unity and necessity that is apparent 
to us in the empirical world, quite regardless of 
the mass of empirical data which argues to the 
contrary. So James put aside the block-universe 
theory, and set himself to look for a more satis- 
factory conception of things. 

Fortunately there have always been insurgent 
philosophies, which, because they lack the con- 
ceptual charm of monism, have appealed less to 
the great semi-cultivated masses, but have there- 
fore often presented all the more depth and critical 
power. Among these James found one which was 
particularly congenial. This was the neo-criti- 
pism of, Charles Renouvier, to which in later 



38 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

years he often paid grateful tribute, 1 and of 
which his own philosophy is in fact a very inde- 
pendent offshoot transplanted to Anglo-Saxon 
soil, where it has gone through an autonomous 
and most original development. I cannot enter 
here into the interesting relations and dif- 

1 As early as 1881, James took occasion to make, in one 
of his lectures, a beautiful eulogy of Renouvier and to 
recommend his works (The Will to Believe. New York, 
1897, p.' 143). Later, he dedicated his magnificent work 
(The Principles of Psychology. New York, 1890) "to my 
dear friend Francois Pillon [Renouvier's collaborator], 
as a token of affection, and an acknowledgment of what 
I owe to the Critique Philosophique." Lastly, his post- 
humous work, which has just appeared (Some Problems of 
Philosophy. New York, 1911), contains an eloquent dedi- 
cation to Charles Renouvier, who "... was one of the 
greatest of philosophic characters, and but for the decisive 
impression made on me in the seventies by his masterly 
advocacy of pluralism, I might never have got free from 
the monistic superstition under which I had grown up. 
The present volume, in short, might never have been 
written. This is why, feeling endlessly thankful as I do, 
I dedicate this text-book to the great Renouvier's memory." 

The Critique Philosophique , politique, scientifique, lit- 
tiraire, which brought out most of James's early essays in 
French almost as soon as they had appeared in English, 
was a courageous review, at first a weekly and later a 
monthly, which was founded and conducted by Charles 
Renouvier (who died in 1903) with the purpose of defend- 
ing the " neo-critical " point of view in every field. It 
was unfortunately given up in 1889, after an existence of 
eighteen years. 



REJECTION OF MONISM 39 

ferences between the philosophies of Renouvier 
and of William James. We need only note that 
neo-criticism is opposed to every variety of 
monistic determinism, and that after the manner 
of Kant, whose tradition he follows (changing 
it in certain cardinal points), Renouvier pre- 
serves in his system under the title of rational 
beliefs the moral postulates of human liberty, of 
the existence of God, and of individual immor- 
tality. You may imagine that such doctrines 
made an instant appeal to James's sympathies; 
although from a literary point of view, nothing 
could be in stronger contrast to his own familiar 
and delightful mode of expression, than Renou- 
vier's fearfully heavy and fatiguing style. But 
the defects in the French philosopher's form are 
compensated by a power of analysis and of rea- 
soning and by a moral fervor that were soon 
to gain James's adherence. The great effect 
which the reading of Renouvier had upon him 
was to bring him to a final and complete rejec- 
tion of monism, which ever since that time he 
has strenuously opposed. 1 

1 The two kinds of monism with which James was most 
occupied and which he particularly attacked, because they 
were the authoritative philosophies of the time, were the 



40 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

I must now give you, without entering into 
technical or chronological detail, a sketch of the 
arguments and views which James evolved in the 
course of his philosophical career. This is not 
easy to do, for he has nowhere left us a system- 
atic and complete exposition of his ideas. The 
last pages of his Varieties of Religious Experi- 
ence led one to hope for a subsequent work which 
should be devoted to this systematic view. But 
owing to the duties of his professorship, other 
contributions to his subject, and ever-failing 
health, the years passed without his being able 
to carry out this project. 

Moreover, although absolutely certain of his 
general design, he had a mind that was too in- 
tent on progress, too constantly in quest of new 
facts, too instinctively averse to anything like 
a fixed and final structure, in a word too in- 
tensely alive, to commit itself willingly to that 
kind of architectural monument which delights 
the professional philosopher. No one was less 

evolutionary naturalism of Herbert Spencer, and pan- 
theistic idealism, brilliantly represented on the one hand 
by the Hegelian or absolutist school of Oxford (Green, 
the Cairds, Bradley), and on the other hand by Royce and 
others in the United States. 



REJECTION OF MONISM 41 

likely than James to write a didactic treatise on 
philosophy. And when one attempts to put the 
very varied contents of his essays and lectures 
into precise and well-arranged formulas, one runs 
the risk of gravely misrepresenting him. It is 
very much like transforming a virgin forest by 
laying out roads and cutting vistas through it. 
James is one of those personalities who by their 
exuberance, their great originality, and their 
emancipation from everything conventional affect 
us like one of nature's primordial forces, which 
cannot be readily described or summarized. It 
is in his works themselves — and I may say in al- 
most any one of them — that you must look for 
him if you wish really to know him. His genius 
is so abundant, so varied, and so little preoccu- 
pied with avoiding the appearance of contradic- 
tion that in gathering in his various utterances 
one does not easily frame them into a truly har- 
monious whole. Indeed, it is almost a question 
whether he himself would have been able to pro- 
duce a perfectly linked and coherent system from 
the magnificent treasure of material which he has 

left to us. 1 

1 Such doubts are dispelled by James's posthumous and 
unfinished book (Some Problems of Philosophy. New York, 



42 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

We do not know with certainty what title or 
designation he would have inscribed on the en- 
tabulature of the finished edifice. The name 
Pragmatism is the first to enter one's mind, and 
is coupled by common consent with the name of 
William James. But he often laid stress on the 
fact that this term designates a general method 
practised by many thinkers and capable of lead- 
ing to many other systems of metaphysics than 
his own; so that when he refers to this latter he 
prefers to use various other designations. 
". pi >i . What I want to get at, and let no in- 
terruption interfere, is (at last) my 'system' 
of tychistic and pluralistic ' philosophy of pure 
experience.' " 2 Tychism, Pluralism, Pure Ex- 
perience (or its equivalent, Radical Empiricism) 
were, indeed, the terms of which he was particu- 
larly fond, not to mention a few other more com- 

1911), which is a model of clearness and precision, and 
which makes us regret more than ever that he was unable 
to finish it. 

2 From a letter to me from Cambridge, Mass., dated 
April 30th, 1903. . . . The term Tychism which appears 
but rarely in James's principal works figures largely in the 
detailed program of his course ("Syllabus of Philosophy 
3"), in seven pages, which he had printed for the use of 
bia students in 1902-1903. 



REJECTION OF MONISM 43 

mon ones such as Theism and Meliorism. I im- 
agine that of all these appellations the some- 
what barbarous neologism, Tychism (from rvxVy 
chance), although he used it but infrequently, is 
the one which in the end he would have favored 
as best suited to express a point of view of which 
the chief characteristic, in opposition to most of 
the philosophies now in favor, is precisely the re- 
jection of absolute determinism and the affirma- 
tion of free scope for the creative will — in other 
words, of chance — throughout the universe. 

Be this question of denomination as it may, I 
shall take up successively the various captions 
which I have given above, and roughly indicate 
what James meant by each one. Such a method 
of exposition, desultory and unconnected as it is, 
will not be entirely out of keeping with the ideas 
of a thinker who was never in love with close- 
cropped symmetry or unity of the academic kind. 
Let us begin with Pragmatism. 



IV 

PRAGMATISM 

Pragmatism consists in the use of a very sim- 
ple rule for clearing up philosophic ideas and 
facilitating the discussion of them, but a rule 
which, by implicating a theory as to the nature 
and role of our intelligence, is found to be emi- 
nently subversive of traditional conceptions. 
Thus in Pragmatism are found, closely bound 
together, a method of research and a special 
doctrine concerning the human intellect. 

The method, to speak of that first, may be 
considered as the development of that concrete 
manner of thinking which James appreciated so 
much in Agassiz. An idea or a theory had no 
value for Agassiz unless it could be directly ap- 
plied to observable facts ; could be verified, for 
instance, by the peculiarities in form and struc- 
ture of those famous oyster or tortoise shells 
which his pupils were forced to study so care- 
fully. Well, extend this idea to the whole domain 

44 



PRAGMATISM 45 

of human experience and you obtain the funda- 
mental pragmatic rule, which is to look for the 1/ 
true significance and bearing of an idea, belief, or 
doctrine, always in the particular facts and defi- 
nite consequences which it will bring forth in our 
experience. If the fact of adopting or rejecting 
an idea makes no appreciable difference to us, 
that idea is of no significance ; one can almost say 
that it does not exist, that it is an empty phrase, 
and not even worth discussion. And if two theo- 
ries, professing to be distinct or inconsistent, 
forecast the same result they are not really two, 
but one and the same idea disguised in different 
words. In short the essence of the pragmatic 
method is to avoid falling into verbiage, by test- 
ing even the most abstract philosophical and 
metaphysical conceptions by the results they im- 
ply at some actual future moment, and for some 
concrete aspect of our life. 

Observe, now, that this is the very thing we 
instinctively do, both in ordinary life and in 
science, whenever we wish to avoid being blinded 
and misled by a beautiful theory. In order to 
ascertain what a theory is worth we try to im- 
agine it at work, to see what would be the result 



46 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

of its application, and we appraise it according 
to its purely practical consequences. Even the 
most complicated theories of physics or astron- 
omy, for instance, are judged in the end by their 
utility in predicting eclipses or in explaining elec- 
trical phenomena, and the like. Thus pragma- 
tism amounts simply to introducing into philoso- 
phy the scientific or experimental method which 
already prevails (and ever more widely) in other 
scientific fields, and which insists on the concrete 
verification of every theory. Of course in phi- 
losophy the technical procedures are not those 
of physics or chemistry, but the principle of 
verification is applicable just the same. 

Following more or less in James's steps, let us 
take for an example, the secular aspect of the 
quarrel between materialism and spiritualism. Is 
this world the fortuitous result of atoms colliding 
in infinite time and space, or is there rather an 
Author of it all, a wise and good Being who is 
shaping the course of events? A serious prob- 
lem this, about which much has been and still 
continues to be written, but one which, if treated 
pragmatically, comes down to this simple ques- 
tion: — What difference will it make, in our own 



PRAGMATISM 47 

experience, if we adopt the one or the other hy- 
pothesis? It would make no difference at all, 
clearly, if only the past were in question, for 
our theories would change nothing there; the 
world has been what it has been, that mixture of 
good and evil which we know so well ; and it would 
be, in retrospect, neither better nor worse for 
being either the product of atomic commotion or 
the work of a divine intelligence. If, then, the 
world were to stop at this instant, the material- 
istic and spiritualistic hypotheses would be ab- 
solutely equivalent, and of no distinctive import; 
the opposite principles they invoke having 
yielded, in fact, the same result. But it is very 
different the moment we look into the future, for 
these doctrines open out entirely different per- 
spectives. Materialism, putting at the base of 
the universe blind and unconscious powers such 
as the purely mechanical forces of matter, does 
not permit us to hope that anything permanently 
good, moral, or spiritually satisfying will emerge ; 
and in truth what the prophets of the material- 
istic school, Biichner, Spencer, Haeckel, and the 
rest would have us contemplate is the final anni- 
hilation of all conscious life following upon the 



48 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

cooling-off of our planet. Spiritualism, on the 
contrary, putting the destinies of the universe 
in the hands of an intelligent and moral power, 
offers us the assurance that all the spiritual 
values that confer dignity on human life will be 
eternally safeguarded, and that even from the 
wreck of this material world God would know 
how to bring forth another cosmic order in which 
our ideals would find their realization. And thus 
our sufferings, efforts, and the progress humanity 
has made would not have gone for naught, as the 
theory of the materialists would have it. Thus 
spiritualism is a doctrine of hope, reassurance, 
and encouragement. And there you see the con- 
crete difference which it introduces into the lives 
of its adherents, in contrast to materialism which 
instils but a gloomy despair. 

If you object that the promises of spiritualism 
are dated too far ahead to interest us, James 
would reply that you are forgetting that human 
nature has never ceased to be preoccupied with 
the ultimate fate of the universe. Whether for- 
mulated or not, there is in every man some vague 
eschatological conception which indubitably in- 
fluences his conduct and his attitude towards the 



PRAGMATISM 49 

current of events. And further, the difference be- 
tween the material and spiritual points of view 
penetrates deep into the fiber of every-day 
existence: the first is the negation and subver- 
sion, the second the justification and expansion 
of all those intimate experiences of a moral and 
religious sort which are the inspiration of so 
many human lives, and indeed of civilization at 
large. 

The case which I have just outlined will en- 
able you to grasp the colossal simplification — 
and also the change of approach — which prag- 
matism brings into the disputes of metaphysi- 
cians. You know full well how much argument 
has been raised by the controversy between spirit- 
ualism and materialism, and what a prodigious 
amount of dialectic has been expended by both 
sides in order to demonstrate or to refute the 
existence of the soul and of God, in order to 
explain how mind can govern matter or, on the 
contrary, how cerebral vibrations can generate 
consciousness, and the like. Pragmatism, at one 
sweep, does away with these interminable aca- 
demic discussions, and presents the following 
question not to our reason, but to our moral 



50 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

faculty: Do you care enough for your spiritual 
ideals to dare to believe that the very heart of 
the universe is interested in them also, and will 
provide for their ultimate realization? Or do 
you believe that the whole history of humanity 
and of its struggles towards good are merely a 
series of futile agitations to which the universe 
is perfectly indifferent and which will one day 
end in our utter annihilation? In the first case 
you are a spiritualist, in the second a materi- 
alist. But why dispute about it? Let every 
man take the side which seems to him more 
" rational," that is to say, which satisfies him 
best, and then live according to his conviction, 
leaving it to the future to decide which is 
right. 

You see by this that pragmatism confines itself 
to clarifying and simplifying philosophic sys- 
tems, by reducing them to their practical and 
concrete significance, but it does not decide be- 
tween them; the final decision remains a personal 
matter. The pragmatic method may come out 
to very different conclusions according to the one 
who is using it; and so it has been not unjustly 
compared by some of its most enthusiastic par- 



PRAGMATISM 51 

tisans * to the corridor of an hotel, that serves 
merely as a common passageway through which 
all travelers pass to go to their own special 
rooms where each is free to cultivate his favorite 
philosophy. It is, indeed, as easy for the ma- 
terialist to justify his doctrine pragmatically by 
maintaining his preference for the ultimate sup- 
pression of all conscious being, as it is for the 
spiritualist pragmatically to justify his by de- 
claring himself for that moral ideal which he 
hopes to see triumph. 

You will consequently not be surprised that 
the intellectualist philosophers, accustomed to 
the traditional processes of argumentation, gave 
pragmatism a very poor welcome. They re- 
proached it with being a disguised scepticism, a 
sophistical school teaching and legitimizing both 
the pro and the con, and containing the germ of 
an intellectual anarchy which justifies every man 
in believing what he wishes, according to his 
fancy or his interest. And if they were ac- 
quainted with the Catalogue de Zofingue they 
would hasten to make capital out of its misstate- 

1 The Pragmatic Club of Florence. See Leonardo, April, 
1905, p. 47. 



52 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

ment and to declare that James's pragmatism is 
but a tradesman's philosophy, the incarnation of 
that mercantile and opportunist spirit so char- 
acteristic of the Yankee race. They are horri- 
fied by the fundamental principle of the prag- 
matic method, that of judging ideas by their 
practical consequences. This looks to them like 
a sordid utilitarianism. They indignantly pro- 
test at the idea of submitting to the same shabby 
empirical treatment as we give to questions of 
the office or the laboratory, the most sublime 
problems which agitate the human mind, such as 
those of spiritualism and materialism, free-will, 
and determinism, the nature of being and of 
truth, of the existence of a final cause, of sub- 
stance, the absolute, the unity of the universe, 
etc. How can you hope to reduce to concrete 
applications and to matter of fact those tran- 
scendental ideas which surpass all individual ex- 
perience and all human caprice, and how hope 
in such a way to attain to the supreme truths 
hidden behind the chaos of empirical phenomena? 
To which the pragmatists reply that it is in 
question, precisely, whether our intellect is quali- 
fied to attain to any such ultimate and non-con- 



PRAGMATISM 53 

tingent truths, or whether its sole function is not 
rather to assist us in overcoming the concrete 
obstacles of daily life, in attaining our ends in 
the world in which we find ourselves. 

And that is exactly the point of doctrine which 
is implicitly contained in the pragmatic method 
and which will always separate pragmatism or 
anti-intellectualism from intellectualism or anti- 
pragmatism. 

The intellectualists hold the nucleus of man to 
be the intellect which is primary and autonomous, 
with its own self-contained end which is to know, 
that is, to reproduce or copy objective reality 
by means of ideas carefully purged of all per- 
sonal and subjective elements. It is, then, the 
supreme and honorable duty of the scholar and 
philosopher to forget himself completely in his 
search for truth, and to discount entirely his in- 
clinations and the necessities of his personal life. 
For truth must be sought in its sublime purity 
and with no regard to possible consequences ; its 
meaning is hopelessly distorted and the road to 
it is barred in advance if we let sentiment or emo- 
tion, (even the noblest aspirations of our souls 
or the most urgent collective necessities) influ- 



54 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

ence the direction of our thought. To all truly 
reasonable men Pascal's famous " reasons of the 
heart " are but a misnomer, and have nothing to 
do with reason properly so-called, which must 
ignore the promptings of the heart if it ever 
hopes to attain its ideal, the truth. It is surely 
self-evident that truth being, according to the 
received definition, the agreement of thought with 
its object, can be obtained only when thought 
reflects its object uninfluenced by the desires and 
whims of the thinker. 

Quite different is the pragmatist conception 
of our nature. For it man is an essentially active 
and passionate being who strives to find and to 
establish himself amid exterior obstacles, a being 
whose abstract and rational faculty, far from 
being primary and an end in itself, is acquired 
by him in the course of his struggle for existence 
as an instrument which enables him to extricate 
himself from the difficulties in which he finds him- 
self plunged. This amounts to saying that we 
do not live to think, as the intellectualists pro- 
claim, but that we think in order to live. Ac- 
cording to this manner of looking at things, — 
inspired evidently by evolutionary biology which 






PRAGMATISM 55 

finds the reason for the existence of all our func- 
tions in their usefulness to life, — the ideas of our 
intellect are no more than ingenious means of 
facing the exigencies in which we find ourselves, 
and what we call their truth is neither more nor 
less than their efficacy. An idea is true or false 
according as it does or does not answer to the 
needs which gave it birth, according as it fits or 
does not fit the design for which we have shaped 
it, as it leads or does not lead to the desired 
results. In other words the truth of any idea 
or theory is always relative to certain special 
desiderata, and is measured by actual utility, the 
way in which it aids us amid the perplexities 
which have caused us to resort to it. 1 To put it 
in still another way, the sole criterion of truth 

1 " Man is the measure of all things," said Protagoras. 
This deeply pragmatic point of view which rationalists 
have sought to discredit by treating it as the height of 
scepticism, has been revived in our day and brilliantly 
defended by F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford, in Humanism 
(London, 1903). Also the pragmatic conception of the 
essentially instrumental, functional, and teleological value 
of all our ideas and mental operations dominates the 
reform of logic and of the theory of knowledge under- 
taken by J. Dewey and his school (see Studies in Logical 
Theory. Chicago, 1903). Schiller and Dewey are, with 
James, the preeminent champions of pragmatism who, 



56 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

is the satisfaction which it brings us when ap- 
plied to the solution of vexatious problems, and 
to the re-establishing of our equilibrium and 
harmony of mind. 

In support of this doctrine pragmatists cite 
the example of scientific ideas and the notions of 
common sense. As for these latter, such as the 
belief in the independent and permanent exist- 
ence of material objects, in the consciousness of 
our fellow-men, in the ordinary causal connec- 
tions, and the like, it is evident that since they 
cannot be demonstrated by any logical necessity 
they must originally have been pure hypotheses, 
attempts at the interpretation of immediate ex- 
perience, and it is evident that they have become 
fixed by reason of their success and their utility, 
while many other tentative hypotheses have not 
survived. 

For an instance : the infant who drops his rat- 
tle no longer thinks about it ; he has not yet ac- 
quired the idea that objects continue to exist 
when they are no longer perceived. This idea 

while they manifest slightly different tendencies, are all 
agreed as to its fundamental principles. Dewey has also 
set forth a doctrine of immediate experience or " im- 
mediatism" closely allied to James's radical empiricism. 



PRAGMATISM - 57 

must have dawned, one fine day, on the animal 
world under the pressure of need, and become 
gradually established by virtue of its fruitful 
consequences in causing things lost sight of to 
be searched for and found; for in and of itself, 
and in so far as pure thought is concerned, the 
continued existence of an unperceived object is 
quite as unlogical, mysterious, and incomprehen- 
sible as would be its repeated creation and anni- 
hilation. In the same way, if we believe in the 
mental life of our fellow-men instead of consider- 
ing them as unconscious machines (as Descartes 
conceived animals, and as learned physiologists 
have considered man himself), it is not because 
we are able to demonstrate this mental life logi- 
cally, but because its rejection would deprive 
us of constant emotional satisfactions. Imagine 
the interest, James somewhere said, that your 
fiancee would inspire in you if you knew her to 
be an automaton, a mere mechanical doll, re- 
sponding to your voice with every mark of ten- 
derness but feeling no inner emotion. 

As for our scientific ideas and theories, you 
are well aware that an entirely pragmatic con- 
ception of their value and truth had already de- 



58 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

veloped among natural scientists long before the 
birth of pragmatism in philosophy. Molecules 
and atoms, ions, and electrons, ether and its 
vibrations, ideas of genus and species, the prin- 
ciples of inertia and of the conservation of 
energy, and in fact all natural laws are the crea- 
tions of our mind in its effort to orient itself 
amid the chaos of facts, to understand or " ex- 
plain " and to foretell the facts of sensible ex- 
perience. They are not absolute truths or the 
adequate expression of objective realities, as in- 
tellectualism would have them be, but convenient 
hypotheses, useful postulates, tools, which are 
effective in manipulating phenomena. Such, in 
fact, are all of the fundamental theories and con- 
ceptions which science uses ; their value and sig- 
nificance reside in their concrete results, in their 
power to transform the perceptual chaos into a 
world of order and harmony which satisfies our 
intellect. And often this aim of ours is as yet 
far from being realized; there have been many 
" truths " that were long held to be incontesta- 
ble, such as the indestructibility of atoms, which 
have had to be revised because they no longer 
squared with the facts. 



PRAGMATISM 59 

If science and common sense have always pro- 
ceeded in this manner, — I mean by incessantly 
testing, and so groping towards hypotheses which 
satisfactorily cover the concrete data of experi- 
ence, — why should philosophy do otherwise and 
cling to hollow abstractions and " absolute prin- 
ciples " which have no direct contact with em- 
pirical realities? Philosophy differs, it is true, 
from the other disciplines in that because it aims 
at a total conception of the universe and of life 
it cannot rest content with meeting this or that 
particular need of our mind. But this does not 
excuse it from meeting at least these needs, and 
it is difficult to see what the criterion of the defini- 
tive philosophy (the philosophy which every one 
will accept) should be unless it be the full and 
complete satisfaction of all our needs. Certes, 
we are far from having attained this ideal, and 
do not know whether it will ever be attained. But 
at all events the way to approach it is not in 
advance to forbid philosophy, as do the intellec- 
tualists, to take into consideration the demands 
of the emotional and practical sides of our being! 

We cannot expect the pragmatists and intel- 
lectualists to come to an early agreement, for 



60 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

their opposite ways of looking at the nature and 
role of our intellect are doubtless symptoms of 
profound differences of temperament and men- 
tality. 1 I leave this problem for your medita- 
tion. But before taking up another subject I 
ought to add that although James was for 
twelve years the most illustrious representative 
of the pragmatic method, he was not the inventor 
of it and has never professed to be. He assigned 
the credit for this to his friend and fellow-coun- 
tryman, Charles Peirce, a scientist and philoso- 
pher who is far too little known and whose prin- 
cipal work on the subject with which we are deal- 
ing passed almost unnoticed until, twenty years 
later, James rescued it from obscurity and made 
it famous. 2 

1 See, however, P. Bovet's conciliatory essay: La Defini- 
tion pragniatique de la vSriU. St.-Blaise, 1910, p. 37. 

2 Peirce's article appeared in the Popular Science Monthly 
of January, 1878, and was translated into French the 
following year. He shows that all beliefs are but rules of 
action : " the whole function of thought is to produce habits 
of action . . . whatever there is connected with a thought, 
but irrelevant to its purpose [it may be something dis- 
tracting or amusing], is an accretion to it, but no part of 
it. . . . To develop its meaning, we have, therefore, simply 
to determine what habits it produces, for what a thing 
means is simply what habits it involves. . . . Our idea of 



PRAGMATISM 61 

It was, indeed, from Peirce that James took 
the name and fundamental proposition of prag- 
matism, but he had already found the spirit of 
it more or less implied in many earlier philoso- 
phers, notably so in the English empiricists, 
Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and especially John 
Stuart Mill. In view of this he called his book 
on this subject Pragmatism, a New Name for 
Some Old Ways of Thinking. 1 The word itself 
(used in a somewhat different sense) and the es- 
sentially pragmatic principle are to be found also 
in Kant, who in affirming the " priority of the 
practical (moral) Reason over the theoretical 
Reason " in matters of belief, gave one of the 

anything is our idea of its sensible effects." The rule for 
making our ideas clear is, then, to "Consider what effects, 
which might conceivably have practical bearings, we con- 
ceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our 
conception of these effects is the whole of our conception 
of the object." But it was not until 1898 that pragmatism 
really came to public notice through James's far-famed 
lecture at the University of California, " Philosophical Con- 
ceptions and Practical Results." 

1 Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of 
Thinking. Popular Lectures on Philosophy by William 
James. New York, 1907. The work is dedicated " To 
the memory of John Stuart Mill from whom I first learned 
the pragmatic openness of mind, and whom my fancy likes 
to picture as our leader were he alive to-day," 



62 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

simplest and clearest definitions of the pragmatic 
attitude. 1 And if the essentials of this attitude 
consist in subordinating the intellect to the 
moral faculties and in making the former merely 
an auxiliary to volition and feeling (an indis- 
pensable one, to be sure, but still an auxiliary) 
it is evident that pragmatism has always figured 
prominently: — as much so, perhaps, as the oppo- 
site tendency which makes the intelligence the 
chief of our faculties and very nearly the entire 
man. With us, in particular, it has always been 

1 If James does not cite Kant among his intellectual 
predecessors, it is because he seems never quite to have 
appreciated the philosopher of Konigsberg, whose crabbed 
dryness, pedantry, and scholastic pomposity were repellent 
to his artistic nature, and aroused his irony. While he 
doubtless respected the old sage's moral rectitude, he 
nevertheless delighted to brand his system of philosophy 
with terms as picturesque as they were irreverent — " musty 
academicism," "the Kantian curiosity-shop," etc. . . . 
James held that Kant brought to philosophy no single 
indispensable idea which it did not possess already or 
which it was not sooner or later to acquire by the natural 
development of English empiricism, and that the great 
line of progress of modern thought should not be drawn 
through Kant, but should go around him as around an 
obstacle. It is true that no one person is indispensable 
to philosophy any more than to anything else; and yet, 
aside from other considerations, without Kant should we 
have had Renouvier, and without Renouvier should we 
have had the James whom we so love and admire? 



PRAGMATISM 6$ 

in the air. All our Latin-Swiss thinkers were 
more or less pragmatists without knowing it; I 
mean without suspecting that their way of think- 
ing was one day to be erected into a precise 
method bearing a name. For in their case it was 
quite consciously and intentionally that they 
chose their moral instincts, rather than pure 
logic, as guides in their philosophic speculation. 
A distinguished writer, Albert Schinz, anti-prag- 
matic to the marrow, although he too is a Swiss 
(there is no rule without its exceptions), has re- 
cently pointed out that Rousseau was one of 
James's most unmistakable precursors on the 
road to pragmatism. 1 One might add here also 

1 Albert Schinz: <( Jean- Jacques Rousseau, a Forerunner 
of Pragmatism." Chicago, 1909 (39 pp.)- Mr. Schinz is a 
professor at Bryn Mawr College. We are indebted to him 
for some spicy articles on intellectual and social movements 
in the United States, and a volume which is a searching 
polemic against pragmatism, Anti-Pragmatisme examen des 
droits respectifs de Varistocratie intellectuelle, et de la 
democratie sociale. Paris, 1909 (309 pp.)- According to 
him, pragmatism is for the masses and for sentimental 
minds which are solicitous for the happiness of humanity, 
but it has nothing to do with true philosophy which is a 
purely intellectual, objective, and impersonal study for 
which the intellectual 6lite alone is fitted; and he tries to 
show that the present pragmatist movement is merely the 
result and expression of the needs, tendencies, and condi- 



64 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

Vinet, Ch. Secretan, Aug. Bouvier, Ern. Naville, 
and G. Frommel who, despite their often offen- 
sively intellectualistic methods of argument, all 
believed that man must proceed toward truth 
not by the aid of his intellect alone, but with 
the help of all the powers of his soul. (I do not 
speak of Amiel for in his fluid and polymorphous 
nature one can find a hint of everything.) And 
as to the two thinkers whose recent loss is so 
lamented by the University of Geneva, we can 
easily discover the pragmatist thread running 
through the philosopl^ of J. J. Gourd and the 
theology of Ernest Martin. What more signifi- 
cant in this connection than such observations 
as the following, which occur in even the earliest 
manuscripts of Martin, and in which we seem to 
find those ideas anticipated which James was to 
promulgate more widely some years later: 

tions of existence in American society of the present day. 
This book is interesting even to those who in no sense 
share the views of its author. It contains much that is 
true and some remarkable pages which clearly reveal the 
chasm which separates the intellectualist from the prag- 
matist temperament. It is to be regretted that James did 
not see fit, or did not have time, to reply to this animated 
criticism, which he referred to as an "amusing sociological 
romance," 



PRAGMATISM 65 

(1877) "There is something higher than intel- 
lect and that is life, of which the intellect is but one 
function. . . . The intellect cannot emancipate it- 
self from that which supports it, and which it is 
bound to serve. . . . We are made to act rather 
than to think. We think and we must think, but our 
thought must be subordinated to our life, of which 
it is a function. . . . Every function has its proper 
place, which it must keep: thought steps out of its 
place when it says: — I propose to exercise myself 
quite independently of the organism of which I form 
a part. And this is also what it is doing when it es- 
says to give an account of what is, before allowing 
the senses and the will to play their part. ..." 

(1878) " Every man tends, when he thinks or 
reflects, to take cognizance only of what can be 
formulated in a clear-cut thought; yet how many 
realities there are in life which it is impossible to 
reduce to a familiar phrase or even to a formal 
proposition. . . . Only that which is clear and 
definite exists for science; whereas in life there are 
quantities of things which are neither clear nor, 
definite, and which have carefully to be taken into 
account lest we come to grief. . . . Any goal as- 
signed to life is narrow and inadequate if it is other 
than life itself — life full, harmonious and complete. 
And life is not an idea, it is an act." 

(1886) "All the great philosophical problems 
which agitate the minds of men are but parts of 
the sovereign problem of life; this problem is un- 
solved; we are in the act of solving it, each for him- 



66 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

self, every day, by our voluntary choices. The phil- 
osophical solutions are always more or less di- 
rectly dependent upon this primary practical solu- 
tion. . . ." 

As for Gourd, under the cover of an extremely 
abstract dialectic, which would have been little to 
James's taste, he has left us a very original sys- 
tem of philosophy founded entirely on a broadly 
applied principle of value (the emancipation of 
the spirit), which is pure pragmatism and which 
carries with it, in spite of differences in termi- 
nology and notwithstanding its entirely inde- 
pendent origin, important points of contact be- 
tween his system and that of James. 

We are, on the whole, a race of born pragma- 
tists : we are anti-intellectualistic by instinct, and 
our sympathy is assured in advance to any phi- 
losophy such as James's. This is to be explained 
by the fact that there are certainly deep and sub- 
tle affinities between the great currents of philo- 
sophic thought and those of a political, social 
and religious order. James himself remarked, on 
several occasions, that his conception of things 
squared with liberty, exact science, democracy, 
and protestantism. By putting the accent, he 



PRAGMATISM 67 

said, on concrete realities, particular things, the 
individual, and precise consequences (instead of 
on abstractions, general ideas, and broad imper- 
sonal principles) pragmatism overturns the 
" throne of authority," so to speak, in the same 
sense as did the religious reformation. And just 
as the papist mind often sees nothing but an- 
archy and disorder in protestantism, in like man- 
ner, to deeply intellectualist minds pragmatism 
must appear to be a philosophy of pure confu- 
sion. Nevertheless, he concluded, the protestant 
countries have continued to exist, flourish, and 
develop, and it is fair to predict the same of this 
philosophic protestantism, Pragmatism. 



V 

* 

RADICAL EMPIRICISM 

Let us now leave Pragmatism, which is com- 
patible with many different systems, to take up 
the particular conceptions and more personal 
views with which it was associated in William 
James's mind. And at the outset let us place 
ourselves at the heart of this thinker's philoso- 
phy, at the very center from which the roads 
radiate in all directions. I refer to his Radical 
Empiricism or the doctrine of pure experience. 

In order to grasp fully its originality, one 
must remember that in all ages philosophers have 
been divided between two opposing tendencies, 
rationalism and empiricism, according as they 
instinctively depended when seeking to discover 
reality, upon the mere use of reason or upon in- 
formation derived from experience (external or 
internal), upon ideas or upon facts, upon the 
" conceptual " or upon the " perceptual." We 
have seen that from the first James adhered to 

68 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 69 

the second tendency, which is almost a racial 
heritage among Anglo-Saxon thinkers. But he 
believed that his predecessors had not known how 
to push their method to its conclusion, and that 
instead of deriving all that it was capable of 
yielding they had often forsaken it and fallen, 
like the rationalists, into the toils of vicious ab- 
stractionism. As against these inconsistent or 
short-winded empiricists, as well as against all 
rationalists, James presents his Radical Em- 
piricism which makes reality coincide unquali- 
fiedly with experience, and experience with 
reality. " All that is experienced is real, and all 
that is real is experienced : " such is the formula 
in which James might have summarized his doc- 
trine had it not been for his aversion to proposi- 
tions which seem to be dogmatic or absolute; and 
in so doing he would have excellently defined his 
empiricist position as in direct contrast with that 
Hegelian top notch of rationalism : " All that is 
rational is real, and all that is real is rational." 
Let us survey briefly James's attitude in some 
of the principal branches of philosophy, that we 
may understand just how his empiricism goes 
further than that of his predecessors and so de- 



70 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

serves the epithet radical, which he expressly pre- 
fixed to it. 1 

I. First of all, in psychology, the most reso- 
lute empiricists, like Hume and John Stuart Mill, 
after having reduced our mental life introspec- 
tively to its elementary data (sensations of all 
sorts), have concluded from the fact of their 
distinctness for analysis that these elements are 
in reality originally separate, and have then 
found themselves unable to reconstruct the unity 
of our consciousness out of the dust of these 
isolated elements. 2 Thus they fell victim to their 
rationalist adversaries who have always declared 
the mysterious unity of the " Ego " to be inex- 
plicable save by a special metaphysical principle 
(the Soul, Monad, Spiritual Substance, transcen- 

1 The reader who is dismayed by the somewhat arid and 
abstruse character of the following paragraphs, has but to 
skip them and go directly to Pluralism, p. 100. 

2 " For my part," said Hume, " I must plead the privi- 
lege of a skeptic, and confess that this difficulty is too hard 
for my understanding" {Treatise on Human Nature, Book 
I, Appendix) . And John Stuart Mill declared it " inex- 
plicable " and " incomprehensible " that a succession of 
separate states of consciousness can take cognizance of 
itself, as a succession, in a new present state of conscious- 
ness. {Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, 
Chapter XII). 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 71 

dental Apperception, etc.) adduced for the pur- 
pose of affecting the synthesis of this empirical 
multiplicity. 

To this William James replies that the " Soul " 
is a doubly useless hypothesis. First of all it is 
only a word substituted for an explanation, for 
if our consciousness were really composed of sep- 
arate elements, one fails to see how one element 
more, a metaphysical entity beyond the field of 
direct observation, could succeed in reuniting 
them ; the mystery is not to be solved by suppos- 
ing behind the scenes a deus ex machina that shall 
somehow achieve the incomprehensible. But in 
the second place, more especially, the soul is 
superfluous because the dilemma for which it was 
invented does not exist; it is not true that our 
psychic life is made up of a multiplicity of ele- 
ments, each having its independent existence, 
which have to be reunited; for what actual ex- 
perience presents is a multiplicity originally given 
as one act or one field of consciousness. The 
unity here is just as primitive as the multiplicity, 
and requires no more explanation than does the 
latter; the fact is sufficient. The one which is 
many, or the many which are one, is the plain 



72 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

empirical fact. In other words, it is altering the 
nature of reality to compare our consciousness, 
as does the whole empiricist school, to an aggre- 
gate, a mosaic of juxtaposed elements, as if to 
something like a cloud of dust or a shower of 
sparks. A simile which would better correspond 
to actual observation would be that of a continu- 
ous current, a stream in which the ripples suc- 
ceed one another and pass continuously one into 
another without break. It is our abstract con- 
ceptual thought that, agreeably to its own dis- 
junctive procedure, isolates and arbitrarily fixes 
certain portions of this stream of consciousness, 
taking no account of their real and continuous 
movement; just as instantaneous photography 
catches a galloping horse or a flying express- 
train and reports it in a motionless image on 
paper. But such an image is neither the train 
nor the horse, and the speed and power which 
in reality these possessed have all been lost. Such 
is the difference between our mental life as it is 
actually lived and this life as it is pictured in 
our descriptions and logical analyses. 

For example, we conceive the present as a 
mathematical point or the blade of a knife, divid- 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 73 

ing the past which is no longer from the future 
which is not yet. But in the given reality these 
three things melt into one another without the 
least separation; every moment of our immediate 
experience is a becoming, a duration, which unites 
in an indivisible whole the future already dawn- 
ing on the present and the present already mov- 
ing into the past. Language with its separate 
words and logic with its static ideas are power- 
less to give a just account of this fluid, mobile 
reality, which to be rightly apprehended must be 
actually lived. Even in the cases where there 
appears to us to be a sudden break in continuity, 
resulting in the clear juxtaposition of two dis- 
tinct states, — as when an unexpected explosion 
breaks in on silence, — if we observe carefully, we 
perceive that the first state continues into the 
second without, strictly speaking, any separa- 
tion; and if we wish to describe the experience 
accurately we must admit that it was not the 
perception of an explosion but the perception-of- 
an-explosion-which-broke-the-silence. For the 
sense or the recollection of the preceding silence 
continues as an integral part of the perception 
of the noise. 



74, PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

To sum up, although every moment of our life, 
every pulsation of consciousness has for us a mul- 
tiple content, a complexity of aspects or objects 
each of which our thought takes note of, and 
is so able to abstract it from the rest, this does 
not signify that such a moment of consciousness 
has been compounded from a collection of frag- 
ments whose synthesis must now be accounted for. 
Nor does it signify that our whole life is a series 
of separate moments which have to be strung 
together like the beads of a necklace upon a hid- 
den metaphysical thread. In fact the continuity 
and unity of our consciousness or personality are 
immediately experienced, and are by this same 
token real. By carefully noting and describing 
this unity, James's radical empiricism guards 
against either losing sight of it, as does ordinary 
empiricism, or having to go for a so-called ex- 
planation of it to principles that are beyond the 
pale of experience, as does rationalism. 

II. In epistemology (or the theory of 
knowledge) James's philosophy takes the same 
middle course between the two traditional 
extremes. 

You know that in every cognitive act analysis 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 75 

discovers two factors, on the one hand the intui- 
tions of sense or the data of perception, and on 
the other the intellectual elements which serve to 
bind the sense-intuitions together, such as the 
concepts of identity, resemblance, difference, 
space and time, quantity and quality, causality, 
finality, possibility, necessity, reality, and in 
short all the ideas of relation which are, so to 
speak, the skeleton of our thought, and the logi- 
cal scaffolding of our scientific and philosophical 
edifices. Now empiricists have always been much 
embarrassed by these intellectual factors, for 
which they are unable to find a satisfactory ori- 
gin among the sense-data; and so these factors 
straightway furnish the rationalists with an ex- 
cuse for alleging that they are principles which 
utterly transcend experience. These are the ra- 
tionalists' so-called innate ideas, a priori con- 
cepts, categories of the understanding, synthetic 
acts of pure reason, and so forth. Here 
again James takes his stand on introspective 
psychology and asserts that as a fact the re- 
lationships which our thought conceives as 
obtaining between the brute facts of sense, 
are themselves found just as much in immedi- 



76 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

ate experience as are the brute facts ! 1 The 
result is that the famous categories of the 
mind, which have always been the corner-stone 
of rationalism and the stumbling-block of classi- 
cal empiricism, cease to exist for radical em- 
piricism. For however transcendent and purely 
rational these concepts may appear to the super- 
ficial observation of the logicians, any careful 
psychologist can easily ascertain that they are 
wholly drawn from the facts of experience, and 
that their concrete reality is as undeniable as 
that of any other fact of experience. The truth 
is that our inner life is far richer, more varied 
and profound than most philosophers, whether 
empiricist or rationalist, have realized, and that 
when attentively examined it is found to contain 
a host of original experiences which have escaped 
the observation of both the one and the other. 

1 James does not mean to imply that in each particular 
case the true relationships are necessarily perceived, for 
we should then be infallible; and should never be guilty, 
for example, of the famous sophism 'post hoc ergo propter 
hoc which often leads us to admit a bond of causality 
where there is actually nothing but a chance succession. 
We are naturally subject to error and our experience must 
ceaselessly correct itself by extension and development; 
thus engendering science. What James means is that al- 
though we may be often deceived in experiencing these 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 77 

This discovery, James's great contribution to 
psychology, constitutes the basis of his radical 
empiricism, both in metaphysics and episte- 
mology. Before his time, phenomena were looked 
upon as sense-impressions only if their stability, 
and persistence in memory and imagination were 
sufficiently striking to attract the vulgar atten- 
tion and to receive a name in the language, — such 
as red, cold, hard, mountain, table, joy, anger, 
and the like. And even in language there are 
many words, such as prepositions and conjunc- 
tions, which no one would have supposed to refer 
to a concretely felt or perceived entity; these are 
not, it was thought, facts of experience strictly 
speaking, but simply logical relations. Such 
words are but, if, and, because, on condition that, 
then, for, neither, etc. William James, in his 
celebrated essay " On Some Omissions of Intro- 
ideas of relation, nevertheless these ideas have their origin 
somehow in the immediate experience itself. For instance, 
our idea of causal connection is drawn from the undeniable 
experience of personal activity, yet we may still be in 
error when in special cases we seem to experience causality; 
just as when in a railway station we think that our own 
train is in motion while in reality it is the neighboring 
train, our illusion consists not in our belief in motion, 
which is perfectly real, but in our false localization of it. 



78 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

spective Psychology," * was the first to call at- 
tention to the fact that these words, however 
empty they may appear in themselves, are not 
without sensory content, and that each one of 
them, pronounced by itself, throws us into a men- 
tal attitude, an expectancy, sometimes almost an 
emotion, which is perfectly positive and distinct. 
Thus a definite sentiment is aroused by but, by 
if, by where, etc., — a sentiment which, though 
fleeting and unanalyzable, a mere transitive state 
between ideas where the mind as it were alights, 
is still as concretely precise, and actually ex- 
perienced as are the most pronounced " substan- 
tive states " (sensations, perceptions, images, 
and memories). It is true that in ordinary life 
we are too much absorbed by these latter, on ac- 
count of their practical importance and their 
relative permanence, to notice the " transitive 
states " which bind them together, and which are 
" always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be 
glimpsed except in flight." But just as the flight, 
in spite of its rapidity, is as much a fact as is 
the position of rest, so the quasi-instantaneous- 
ness of our passage from one mental state to an- 
1 Mind, 1884, Vol. IX, pp. 1-26. 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 79 

other as we pronounce or hear pronounced the 
little connecting words in the course of a phrase, 
must not deceive us as to the positive and imme- 
diate reality of that experience of passage. 

What I have just said in regard to those por- 
tions of consciousness which correspond to prep- 
ositions and conjunctions is only an illustration 
of these transitive states, which were entirely 
neglected until James established their full right 
to be recognized as psychic realities on a par 
with the substantive states. He adduces many 
other examples, which show us that these transi- 
tive states constitute the very threads of our life. 
They are those feelings of tendency, significance, 
intention, intellectual and moral attitude, those 
inner movements of all sorts which we so per- 
sistently name after the goals towards which they 
aim, that finally we come to notice only the latter 
and to lose sight of the equally real transitive 
process which leads up to them. If one applies 
oneself, as James did, and as contemporary psy- 
chology is doing more and more, to a considera- 
tion of these fleeting elements in our mental life, 
it becomes evident that the domain of what is 
directly experienced and lived extends far be- 



80 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

yond the gross sensations which were all that 
had struck earlier observers. 1 In the end this 
realm is found to be so far-reaching as to include 
everything, even the mental categories, so that 
in this continuous network constituted by the 
data of actual experience, there remains no gap 
through which to introduce elements of another 
order, such as the a priori principles of the ra- 
tionalists. 

III. There remains, however, one cardinal 
epistemological concept which seems to be excep- 
tional in that it apparently cannot be traced 
back to experience, namely the idea of " truth," 
or the relation of consciousness to its object. Is 
it not, after all, the very essence of all conscious- 
ness that it has an object, that it points to some- 
thing outside of and other than itself; and is it 
not evident that such a relation as that, the cog- 
nitive or noetic relation, is of a purely concep- 
tual nature, quite foreign and irreducible to 
given facts of perceptual experience? These lat- 
ter simply are, but do not aim at anything out- 
side themselves. Are not the function of knowing 

1 See, for instance, P. Bovet: L'Etude exp6rimentale du 
Jugement et de la Pensee. Archives de Psychologic, 1908, 
t. VIII, pp. 9-48. 






RADICAL EMPIRICISM 81 

and the idea of truth which is implied by it 
sufficient squarely to refute ^radical empiricism? 
This question occupied James a great deal. He 
studied it from every side and wrote a number 
of articles (afterwards collected in a book *) 
whose object was to replace the intellectualist 
conception of truth, which he felt to be mere 
verbiage, by his own pragmatic conception, which 
is the only one that squares with the facts and 
with radical empiricism. Since this subject is 
somewhat intricate I shall try to illustrate 
James's idea by an elementary example. 

While occupied at my desk I hear a noise out- 
side the door and recognize the voice of my friend, 
Paul. Wherein consists the truth of my reflec- 
tion, " That is Paul "? The truth of this thought 
evidently lies in its conformity with its object, 
that is to say with the fact that it is indeed Paul, 
and no one else, who is in the vestibule. Unques- 
tionably, replies the pragmatist, but what exactly 
does this vague word conformity (or its equiva- 
lents — correspondence, agreement, etc.) imply in 
this particular case? 

1 The Meaning of Truth, a Sequel to Pragmatism. New 
York. 1909. 



82 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

In this case, many of you would doubtless 
answer, it signifies that if I should open the door 
I should actually find Paul; in other words I 
should see him, shake hands with him, speak to 
him, and thus directly ascertain that I had not 
been mistaken in thinking that I recognized his 
voice. Exactly so, James would reply. Your 
sound common sense leads you straight to the 
pragmatic definition of truth and, by the same 
token, to the verification of radical empiricism. 
The truth of my belief in Paul's presence lies 
in its verification by a series of concrete and im- 
mediate experiences: having heard Paul's voice 
I have risen from my chair, gone to the door of 
my room, opened it, entered the hall, seen, and 
fully verified the presence of my friend, Paul. 
In other words my initial experience (the hearing 
of Paul's voice) has led me, through a series of 
other clearly defined experiences, to my final ex- 
perience which is the fulfilment of what the first 
one predicted. 1 And you clearly perceive that 
all this is but a succession of experiences, bound 

1 For the sake of brevity I do not consider the case in 
which verification is completely followed out, and I omit 
James's theory of the conceptual substitutes for possible 
experience, with which we are so often satisfied. 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 83 

together by transitions that are equally experi- 
enced, and that nowhere are we dealing with any 
so-called purely conceptual relation between mind 
and a transcendent object. 

But here the intellectualists will object: — You 
have just made the most unpardonable blunder, 
putting the cart before the horse and mistaking 
the effect for the cause. In point of fact it is 
not because your idea that Paul was outside was 
verified that it was true, but it is only because 
it was true that you were able to verify it. As 
for asking in what its truth, its conformity with 
its object, consists in the particular case that is 
simply a misconception; particular cases differ 
according to the nature of the thoughts and of 
their objects, but not in the relation that unites 
the one to the other, for it goes without saying 
that this relation — from the moment that it is 
what it should be, namely, truth and not error — 
is always the same, is universal, eternal, unique, 
and undefinable. It is, namely, the original rela- 
tion called Truth! That truth is prior to all 
verification, and that it constitutes the inalien- 
able essence of every " true " proposition is self- 
evident, and must simply be acknowledged. What 



84 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

proof can you wish? Of the pair of contradic- 
tories, " Mars is inhabited " and " Mars is 
uninhabited," we are taught by logic that one is 
necessarily true, the other false; and though it 
is doubtless to be regretted that we do not know 
which is true, that does not alter the case; 
the one that is true is so in and of itself, inde- 
pendently of any verification. And one may say 
that it always has been and always will be true. 
For even if the state of Mars were to change, 
that would in no way influence the eternal truth 
of the proposition expressing what it had been 
previous to that change. It is not even necessary 
that a proposition should be thought for it to 
be true; do you not know that among all the 
possible pairs of contradictory propositions, even 
among those which have never entered any one's 
mind and which perhaps never will, there is nec- 
essarily one of each pair that is true? And have 
not the scholastics already framed the concept 
of an Absolute Truth which comprises all these 
true propositions, and of which the partial truths 
that we discover are but the tiniest crumbs? 

But the protestations of intellectualism do not 
mislead James. He sees but a verbal, abstrac- 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 85 

tionist's chimera in this Platonic theory which 
makes of " Truth " a sort of intermediate realm, 
prior to all human consciousness and hovering 
like some impalpable cloud between reality on 
the one hand and thought on the other. In his 
eyes these last two alone exist (both made, for 
that matter, of the same stuff — experience), and 
the term truth does not express any transcendent 
and indefinable relation to some sphere independ- 
ent of ourselves, but it designates a particular 
relation, which always exists concretely, between 
the different portions of our experience itself. A 
state of consciousness, a bit of experience (such 
as hearing Paul's voice), is in itself neither true 
nor false; it is, merely, and bears the immediate 
evidence of its reality. But whether this initial 
state terminates through a series of concrete in- 
termediaries (rising, going into the hall) in a 
new experience (the actual seeing of Paul) which 
is felt to be the continuation, development, and 
full confirmation of the first one; or whether, on 
the contrary, it terminates in a contradiction 
(finding myself in the presence of a stranger 
whose voice I had mistaken for Paul's) : — it is 
in either case judged true or false retrospectively 



86 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

on the ground of an actual experience which of 
itself is in turn neither true nor false, but is 
what it is (the actual presence of Paul or of a 
stranger). 1 For James, in short, truth is not 
an intrinsic and indefinable quality of certain 
propositions, as it is for the intellectualists, but 
is something extrinsic and adventitious which 
adds itself to a fact of experience, and which con- 
sists in certain concrete relations supervening 
between this fact and the further course of ex- 
perience. 

As for the truths which have been handed down 
to us, such as that lead melts at 330°, that ex- 
ercise insures health, that the square of the hy- 
pothenuse is equal . . ., etc. — these are sum- 
maries of past experience, desiccated formula? 
which spring into life only when they again ac- 
tively take part at some particular juncture to 
guide our material or intellectual conduct; and 
then their truth consists, once more, in their 

practical success in leading us to new and satis- 
1 This latter experience might in turn become retro- 
spectively true or false in relation to some new and ulterior 
experience which should confirm or negate it (for instance, 
if I were to go on to recognize Paul's personal idiosyn- 
crasies; or if I were suddenly to perceive that it was John 
who had disguised himself as Paul for a joke, etc.). 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 87 

fying experiences, which verify them afresh. 
(See above, p. 29.) 

I cannot attempt to give you an adequate ex- 
planation, in so brief a compass, of the whole 
of James's doctrine of truth. What I have just 
said of it will suffice to give you a glimpse of the 
manner in which, by substituting the pragmatic 
for the intellectualist point of view, he makes the 
theory of knowledge harmonize with his radical 
empiricism. 

IV. In metaphysics, finally, many who are 
loudest in proclaiming the method of experience 
still argue like pure rationalists when, in attempt- 
ing to explain the world of phenomena, they im- 
agine something else behind which serves as its 
substratum or support, some ultra-phenomenal 
or trans-experimental reality, an " Absolute " 
hidden behind the " Relative " — such as Spen- 
cer's Unknowable, Buchner's Force-Matter, 
Haeckel's Substance, or, in the idealistic camp, 
Royce's God or Omniscient Thinker, etc. 
James's radical empiricism rejects all of these 
metaphysical principles as being quite as arbi- 
trary and useless as the " a priori " is in episte- 
mology or the " Soul " in psychology. 



88 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

In truth, not only do these fictions fail to fur- 
nish us with a precise explanation of a single 
phenomenon, since nothing concrete and particu- 
lar can ever be deduced from them, but they lend 
a merely illusory support to the empirical world, 
which has no need for them and is sufficient in 
itself. Why pretend to support or fortify this 
world by a mysterious and inaccessible reality 
situated beyond, which in turn would require to 
be supported by another such, and so on to in- 
finity: for where should we stop? Hindu mythol- 
ogy has the world resting upon an elephant, 
which rests upon a tortoise, which rests upon 
nothing; and since we inevitably reach this noth- 
ing, sooner or later, is it not more reasonable'* to 
suppress in the beginning the hypothetical tor- 
toise and elephant and to recognize that the 
world of experience stands alone with no outside 
support? What childishness on the part of met- 
aphysicians to wish to explain actual reality by 
means of a supposed reality, no idea of which 
latter can be obtained save by symbols borrowed 
from the former, which in itself should be ac- 
cepted as simply an inexplicable fact. For as 
for furnishing a logical deduction of reality, or 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 89 

showing how being came from nothing, or estab- 
lishing the necessity of the world or of God, we 
may as well give it up at the outset. We have 
to-day left far behind us the tricks of legerde- 
main by which Hegelian dialectic flattered itself 
that it accomplished this miracle. A sincere 
philosophy no longer attempts to unveil the man- 
ner in which that which exists sets to work to 
achieve existence; it accepts the reality already 
there, and proposes simply to study its details 
and character, but not to explain its presence, 
which will always remain a fact and for our 
thought an enigma. Why is there anything 
rather than nothing, and why is anything as it 
is rather than otherwise — these are questions that 
are susceptible of no answer; although that may 
not prevent their occurring to many a thinking 
mind. This being the case, James holds that seri- 
ous philosophers must stick exclusively to the 
field of experience — ignoring, however, no part 
of this field — and that anything that does not 
form a part of it should be banished from dis- 



1 In order to be radical, he somewhere says, empiricism 
should admit in its constructions no element which has 



90 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

After the considerations which I have just 
touched upon you will more easily understand 
the very concise outline in which James summed 
up his radical empiricism. It consists, accord- 
ing to him, of three points: first a postulate, 
next a statement of fact, and finally a generalized 
conclusion. 1 

1. The postulate, on which he bases all dis- 
cussion, is that " the only things that shall be 
debatable among philosophers shall be things de- 
finable in terms drawn from experience. (Things 
of an unexperiencable nature may exist ad 
libitum, but they form no part of the material 
for philosophic debate.) " This postulate elimi- 
nates at the outset from the field of discussion 
such metaphysical entities as the Unknowable, 
the Absolute, the Thing-in-itself, etc., which by 
definition are situated outside of all possible ex- 
perience. In this James's radical empiricism 
agrees with the phenomenalism of Renouvier and 
of many modern thinkers, but it departs there- 
from on the following point. 

not been directly experienced, neither should it exclude any 
element that has been directly experienced. 

1 See The Meaning of Truth, Preface, pp. xii et seq. 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 91 

2. The statement of fact is that " the rela- 
tions between things, conjunctive as well as dis- 
junctive (the connections as well as the separa- 
tions), are just as much matters of direct par- 
ticular experience, neither more so nor less so, 
than the things themselves." This sums up what 
we have said above concerning the so-called cate- 
gories of the mind, which it has been the custom 
to contrast with phenomena as elements of a dif- 
ferent kind that hold the phenomena together. 
James ascertained that this difference of nature 
does not exist; what is conceptual is homogene- 
ous with what is perceptual, ideas and things are 
" consubstantial " — that is to say, are all made 
of the same stuff, namely, experience. 

3. From the foregoing statement of fact 
James derives the generalized conclusion, that all 
portions of our phenomenal world are continuous 
one with another, without any foreign principle 
being necessary to serve as their cement or sup- 
port. " The parts of experience hold together 
from next to next by relations that are them- 
selves parts of experience. The directly appre- 
hended universe needs, in short, no extraneous 
trans-empirical connective support, but possesses 



92 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

in its own right a concatenated or continuous 
structure." 

You see that the three elements into which 
James divides his radical empiricism converge 
toward one result, namely, to dispense with every- 
thing which is not experienced. This amounts to 
having definitely exorcised from philosophy the 
fatal demon of the " Absolute " which has so long 
possessed it and, like a vampire, sucked its life 
blood; since in arrogating to itself all true 
reality, it has left no reality for the empirical 
and temporal order of things, which is neverthe- 
less both the setting and the substance of our 
struggles, of our interests, efforts, and affections ; 
in short, of our whole practical and daily exist- 
ence. 

If you should ask me now for more detailed 
enlightenment as to the nature of this " Experi- 
ence " which James substitutes as the true reality 
for the traditional principles of the absolutist 
metaphysicians, for Matter, Substance, the Idea, 
etc. ; or if you should suspect it to be merely a 
new word substituted for the old ones; — I could 
only refer you to yourselves and to your own 
actual " experience," to let you verify it at first- 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 93 

hand. You will find there not, assuredly, the 
whole reality of the universe, but at least a fair 
sample, a solid and authentic fragment of reality. 
In this, James's empiricism is at the opposite 
pole from current metaphysics. Unquestionably 
experience is a word — we cannot talk without 
words — just as Substance, Matter, Idea, etc.; 
but whereas these last expressions, in the mouths 
of their adepts, cover something prodigiously 
abstract, hidden, and distant, which we can at- 
tain only in thought or conceive only symboli- 
cally, experience or reality according to James 
designates primarily the most concrete, positive, 
immediate, and directly given thing that can pos- 
sibly be; namely, our own present moment, our 
actual total Erlebniss just as we live it, in all 
its fullness and complexity. They mean at this 
moment, for instance, this hall with its heat and 
dazzling lights, the sensations arising from our 
internal organs, the words which we utter or 
hear, the ideas and sentiments which they awake 
in us, the distractions which assail us, our more 
or less distinct sense of personality, of who and 
where we are, etc., etc. In ordinary life we 
frequently forget ourselves, and consider as real 



94 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

only the objects that particularly occupy us at 
the moment — flowers, curves of the second 
power, or the viands at a repast, according as 
our interest lies momentarily in horticulture, 
mathematics, or cookery. But inasmuch as we 
are empirical philosophers we are bound to over- 
look nothing, and to remember how incapable a 
formula is of rendering adequately anything of 
which it is characteristic that it cannot be ex- 
pressed or described but can only be directly felt. 
With this precaution one may roughly summar- 
ize experience or reality in the following defini- 
tion which is given somewhere by James : " a 
field of consciousness including its objects 
thought or felt, plus an attitude in regard to 
these objects, plus a sense of self to which this 
attitude belongs." 

The moment, actually lived in its concrete and 
fluid integrity, in which the present insensibly 
changes into the past and makes way for the 
future — that constitutes, then, for each one of 
us the very pivot of reality, the center of all our 
knowledge of the rest of things. 1 From this 

1 " Mein Jetzt und Hier ist der letzte Angelpunkt fur 
alle Wirklichkeit, also alle Erkentniss." James quotes this 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 95 

center the mind reaches out in two directions: on 
the one hand, I embrace, by my memories and 
previsions, the most distant past and future, and 
so I virtually prolong my personal experience 
far beyond the brief fragment of time which con- 
stitutes my immediate present ; on the other hand, 
believing myself not to be alone in the world, I 
imagine more or less adequately the intimate life 
of other things. Yet, far as my thought can 
carry in the universe, I never go outside the do- 
main of experience, actual or possible, of myself 
or of others. Even the so-called material things, 
this table, the molecules and atoms which con- 
stitute it — if they are more than our perceptions 
and representations, if they exist in themselves 
— can only be conceived as consciousnesses, that 
is to say as experiences also, confused and ob- 
scure if you will, but of the same nature as our 
own. 

It would seem from this that James's meta- 
physics might be classed as Panpsychism, 1 since 

aphorism from the eminent philosopher and psychologist 
of Munich, Th. Lipps, as illustrating his own view. 

1 Panpsychism is the doctrine which rejects the meta- 
physical existence of the material world as material, and 
which holds that our entire universe, mineral as well as 



96 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

it sees only experience everywhere, and since an 
unconscious experience is a contradiction. But 
this, I fear, would be somewhat to force James's 
tthought; for although he always seemed sym- 
pathetic toward panpsychism he never explicitly 
supported it; furthermore, pure experience, 
which, James maintains, constitutes reality, has, 
according to him, nothing conscious about it in 
the ordinary sense of the word. This, if I mis- 
take not, is how he puts the case : 

Our immediate experience which we have at 
any actual instant must not be identified with 
pure experience which is continuous with and of 
the same stuff as the former, and which is always 
present, but which it is impossible to recognize 
as such under the conditions imposed by our own 
narrow limitations. For us who are heirs to the 
long travail of human thought immediate ex- 
perience is already shot through with inveterate 
beliefs and logical distinctions — those of self and 
non-self, of body and of spirit, of things real 

vegetable and animal, consists at bottom of realities that 
are immaterial, psychic, mental, conscious, either in an 
individualized and more or less personal form, or in a 
more diffused and amorphous state ("mind-stuff," psychic 
atoms, etc.). 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 97 

and things thought, of permanent objects and of 
their variable relations, of causes and effects, etc. 
— and it would be as difficult for us to trace, in 
our field of consciousness, the line of demarca- 
tion between that which is raw datum or pure 
experience and that which is intellectual interpre- 
tation or thought, as to distinguish in a cyclo- 
rama the place where the real objects of the fore- 
ground join the painted canvas of the distance. 
Perhaps pure experience, bare of all conceptual 
elaboration, does not exist; although to be sure 
there is the new-born child, and there are special 
states such as the awakening from unconscious- 
ness, and certain phases of ecstasy or narcosis, 
etc. But except for these few cases pure experi- 
ence remains for us a sort of unattainable limit 
which we only approach, more or less, by trying 
to live in the present moment without reflecting 
upon it, by abandoning ourselves to pure sensa- 
tion, by trying to relax into the most elementary 
and primordial state of consciousness. Now the 
point to note is that while most philosophers con- 
ceive this primordial state, the origin of all 
psychic life, as a purely subjective state from 
which subsequent evolution draws forth (no one 



98 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

knows how) the idea of a non-self and the rep- 
resentation of an exterior world, for James, on 
the contrary, these primordial facts, these pure 
experiences are entirely objective, simple phe- 
nomena of " sciousness " and not of " conscious- 
ness." * This means that he holds that the distinc- 
tion between self and non-self, implied in the word 
" consciousness," from which we are in a normal 
state unable to free ourselves, is not primary, but 
results from a subsequent construction, from a 
conceptual sorting and classifying of the primi- 
tive experiences. 

Since we are dealing here with a very obscure 
subject and since James's thought on it seems to 
have remained tentative, I will not dwell upon it 
further, but will emphasize merely the essential 
characteristic which he sees in reality. I mean 
its fluidity, its movement, its continuous trans- 
formation, exuberant richness, perpetual growth 
and proliferation; in short, that perpetual be- 

1 One can get some idea of this " sciousness " from the 
fact that the mystics, and some people on coming out from 
under the influence of anesthetics (particularly of nitrous 
oxide), tell of a state in which all sense of the "me" is 
abolished, and where there is nothing but the purely objec- 
tive intuition of something present (the world, God, or 
whatever it may be). 



RADICAL EMPIRICISM 99 

coming which defies all our logical definitions and 
descriptions, and to understand which one has to 
turn to life itself. But this leads us to other as- 
pects of James's philosophy. 



VI 

PLURALISM 

Radical Empiricism leads straight from the 
negation of monism to the assertion of pluralism. 
For if there is anything empirically evident it is 
the plurality, the diversity, the multiplicity of 
phenomena and the impossibility of gathering 
them into that absolute unity advocated by 
monistic philosophers. It is true that in the 
chaos of this universe, at first sight hopeless, our 
science discovers and our actions tend to intro- 
duce certain elements of order, relations ever 
more far-reaching and more numerous, a growing 
measure of systematization and harmony. But 
this work of scientific or practical unification, no 
matter how far one carries it, does not, in fact, 
succeed in suppressing the differences, incompati- 
bilities, and oppositions which on every hand con- 
tinue to strike us. " My pocketbook," said 
James, " has nothing in common with Mr. Mor- 
gan's nor the books which I write with the 
100 



PLURALISM 101 

thoughts of the King of England." This would 
suffice to refute monism, which loses all signifi- 
cance if it tolerates the least discontinuity in its 
block-universe. Pluralism, on the other hand, al- 
lows as much correlation and unity among 
things as one will, provided one leaves to these 
same things their individuality, and does not force 
them to melt together, as monism makes them 
do, or to become telescoped into one. 

In truth the plural aspect of the universe is 
so prevalent and unmistakable that one requires 
the naivete of the ostrich to think of escaping it 
by hiding one's head in the mystery of any 
unique principle, be it Substance, Energy, Idea, 
the Unconscious, the Omniscient, Brahma, or 
anything else. That Absolute which is affirmed 
to be in itself the only reality and of which the 
empirical plurality is but the apparent mani- 
festation remains an indemonstrable supposition, 
a pure matter of faith. Also if the partisans of 
monism wish to justify their dogma they can do 
so only by that pragmatic method which they 
abominate, namely, on the ground of the aesthetic 
Or mystic satisfaction, or of the intellectual ec- 
stasy into which they are thrown by the con- 



102 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

templation of this Absolute Unity in which all 
diversities are supposed to disappear, all differ- 
ences to become reconciled, and all the torments 
of human experience to fade away. Monism, 
on the contrary, inspires an instinctive repug- 
nance in temperaments as moral and artistic as 
that of James, which are left cold by forced at- 
tempts at logical unification, and whose deeper 
interest is attracted to individual realities, to the 
concrete variety of things, and to all the conflicts 
in which a chivalrous spirit feels challenged to 
take a part. In this pragmatic dilemma each 
man must choose for himself. It is possible, to be 
sure, that at bottom the monistic hypothesis is 
right, and that the diversity of this world may 
be but a little game of illusion in which the Ab- 
solute indulges. But James, without denying this 
theoretical possibility, resolutely and unequivo- 
cally adopts the pluralistic hypothesis. 

As James sees it, the whole universe consists 
of a limitless number of individual beings of which 
each one has its own real and independent exist- 
ence, but each one of which may establish rela- 
tionships of all sorts with the others, thus form- 
ing an ever growing network of connections. The 



PLURALISM 103 

unity, or more exactly the uniting, of such a 
world is not complete at the beginning, but comes 
to pass little by little, and there is no certainty 
that it will ever become complete; it is not at all 
impossible that there should always remain refrac- 
tory or hostile realities outside. No such con- 
tingency is admitted by monism, for which there 
can be no isolated and individual beings, since 
every being exists only through its relations to 
all the others and without the others is nothing. 
You perceive the difference between these two 
opposing conceptions. In the universe of monism 
the " All " is prior to the parts which it gener- 
ates, and which it dominates in such a way as to 
maintain eternally a system that is perfectly 
closed and complete. It is a cosmos in which 
all the details are firmly consolidated, like a 
sphere wherein the existence, place, nature, and 
function of each element are assigned to it by 
the whole, and outside of which there is nothing 
that could augment or diminish this compact- 
ness. In the pluralistic universe the parts are 
prior to the whole, which is always unfinished 
and which grows fortuitously by the successive 
addition of independent parts. One can com- 



104 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

pare it to a co-operative society or to a republic, 
which is always open to the accession of new 
members as well as always exposed to attacks 
from without, and whose compact of federation 
is perpetually liable to revision. The universe 
of monism is, on the contrary, a monarchy where 
all is ordered, a hierarchy administered in in- 
exorable fashion, whose scheduled activity ab- 
sorbs the entire energy of its subjects without 
leaving the least independence to any one ; where 
each unit is a cog in the wheels and nothing more. 
Yet pluralism encounters a difficulty from 
which monism considers itself exempt; this is the 
entering into relationship of these independent 
existences, or the " composition of conscious- 
nesses," as James expresses it. How can sepa- 
rate individuals, different currents of experience, 
come to coincide in certain points; how can they 
meet, or have objects and a universe in common? 
How understand, for instance, that when I show 
you this book we can agree upon its existence at 
this point in space, upon its size, color, and title, 
an agreement which proves that we perceive the 
same book, in spite of the subjective diversity of 
the tactile and visual sensations which the book 



PLURALISM 105 

produces in those who perceive it? In the same 
way we do not doubt that all men see the same 
moon, discuss the same universe, and so forth. 
How does it happen, then, that one object can 
thus make itself a part of several different fields 
of consciousness, can serve them as a point of 
contact or intersection, be for them a " contermi- 
nous " experience? 

This problem, which luckily has never embar- 
rassed common sense, has greatly preoccupied 
philosophers, who have offered solutions as vari- 
ous as they are unsatisfactory. Solipsistic 
idealism overrides the difficulty by saying that 
there is nothing outside of my own percepts, 
and that things which I perceive have no 
reality beyond the consciousness which I have 
of them, and that there is no question, con- 
sequently, of a meeting between separate exist- 
ences. This theory, which has the merit of 
being irrefutable, has the defect of being be- 
lieved in by no one, and James always averred 
that to uphold a doctrine which one does not 
believe is to lack not only good sense but sin- 
cerity. He himself never ceased to declare him- 
self a realist ; he never questioned, that is to say, 



106 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

the existence in themselves not only of human 
consciousnesses but also of books, of the moon, 
and of the world at large. Traditional spiritual- 
ism gets out of the difficulty by invoking the 
" faculties of the Soul." Why should not our 
souls, although independent of one another, have 
the faculty of entering into relation either with 
one another or with the physical world, and of 
perceiving, therefore, the same moon and the 
same books? A very simple theory, this, which 
repeats in new words the fact which it pretends 
to explain. Idealistic monism, in its turn, solves 
the difficulty by its doctrine of the universal Con- 
sciousness or the omniscient Mind, which, em- 
bracing in itself all our individual conscious- 
nesses, serves as a bond of union and basis of 
agreement — when there is agreement. But we 
gain little by this explanation, for at once we 
meet the inverse problem, which is utterly insol- 
uble: How should the Supreme Being go so far 
astray as to disperse Himself in a dust of in- 
dividual consciousnesses whose time is spent either 
in ignoring or in fighting with one another? 
Materialism, finally, does not even understand 
the question, and answers irrelevantly, according 



PLURALISM 107 

to its custom, that all is accounted for by 
cerebral vibrations. 

As for James, he thought for twenty years 
over this problem of the co-terminousness of con- 
sciousnesses, divided as he was between the logi- 
cal difficulty of conceiving the fact and the 
invincible evidence afforded by reality, which the 
very method of pragmatism and of radical em- 
piricism forbade him to set in doubt. For, in 
short, these mutual contacts, these unceasing 
identifications of our mental individualities, are 
asserting themselves at every moment, in all our 
relations with our fellow-men. And this is even 
more true of special domains, such as that of 
religion, in which innumerable souls have under- 
gone the immediate, and for them absolutely cer- 
tain, experience of entering into communion with 
a superior consciousness which is at once a part 
of them and yet infinitely surpasses them. 

He pondered, as he tells us, long and vainly 
over this mystery and over the related problem 
of how one and the same entity (an object, an 
idea, a feeling, etc.) can belong at the same time 
to several different streams of consciousness ; or, 
what amounts to the same thing, how independent 



108 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

minds can come to meet and interpenetrate. His 
final conclusion was that we have here a fact 
which transcends logic, and which is irrational 
as all reality is irrational, but which is for all 
that none the less certain, and that to see in this 
an insurmountable difficulty is to be guilty of 
nothing less than vicious intellectualism. 1 

Our thought, to be sure, cannot admit contra- 
dictions ; but reality is never in itself contradic- 
tory; it is we who make it appear so by bringing 
it down to our abstract and fallacious definitions. 
In regard to the point in question it would be 
positively inadmissible to suppose that a thing 
belonging exclusively to one mind should also 
belong to another; but our mania for absolute 
and rigid logic has introduced this " exclusively " 
where it has no business to be. Immediate ex- 

1 Cf. A Pluralistic Universe, especially Chapter V. James 
relates that he was finally moved by the example of 
Fechner, who admitted " that states of consciousness, so- 
called, can separate and combine themselves freely," and 
especially by his reading of the contemporaneous and pro- 
foundly anti-intellectualist philosopher, M. Bergson, to re- 
solve finally "to give up the logic, fairly, squarely, and 
irrevocably," as a philosophical method; for "reality, life, 
experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you 
will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it" (pp. 
181 and 212). 



PLURALISM 109 

perience shows us that in actual reality a thing 
belonging to one mind can at the same time belong 
also to another. In other words, the " coales- 
cence," composition, communion, or mutual inter- 
penetration of minds, strange as it appears if 
one reasons apart from the facts, has nothing 
impossible in itself, since it is taking place in life 
on every hand, at least in certain elementary 
forms. This must be admitted, then, without 
hesitation by the empirical thinker who has defi- 
nitely broken with the intellectualist prejudices 
and, turning his back on abstract logic, has 
resolved henceforth to take his philosophy 
directly from the great current of immediate 
reality. There is no further need to explain the 
given fact of the composition of minds, any more 
than of their separation, or indeed of their very 
existence. 



vn 

TYCHISM 

To this as it were " transverse " pluralism — 
arguing for the simultaneous existence of a mul- 
titude of independent although interrelated con- 
sciousnesses — must be joined, in James's universe, 
a " longitudinal " or successive pluralism, which 
holds that each one of these consciousnesses, in- 
stead of presenting a fixed and immovable state, 
is found to be in a condition of perpetual change. 
I have already insisted on one point — which es- 
capes all exact description but which we verify 
directly in ourselves — the fact of the fluent con- 
tinuity, of the incessant transformation, in a 
word of that ever becoming, which characterizes 
our mental life. " We do not bathe twice in the 
same stream," said Heraclitus. Neither does the 
stream of consciousness ever cease flowing and 
becoming " other " than itself. No one of the 
ripples, or of the moments, is entirely like its 
predecessor, nor can it be deduced therefrom by 
110 



TYCHISM 111 

logical necessity; the new, the different, the un- 
authorized, the unforeseen, everywhere seeps into 
and filters through the old. This forthcoming 
without interval and without rest of that which 
has never been before, this appearance out of 
nothing of the adventitious fact, this reality of 
change and authentic novelty of the future — 
that is what is affirmed by Tychism (or Fortuit- 
ism), 1 which is the inseparable complement of 
James's pluralism and is the direct negation of 
determinism; even as pluralism is of monism. 
This is in a word Chance. 

There is no room for chance in the block-uni- 
verse of the monists, where the most rigorous 
determinism rules down to its minutest part. 
Without doubt, when in ordinary life the deter- 
minist philosophers cast dice or make plans for 
the future, they use, like the rest of the world, 
the term chance and its various synonyms: luck, 
risk, eventuality, alternative, contingency, possi- 
bility, coincidence, etc. But they say themselves 
that these expressions are improper and are ex- 

1 These two expressions are taken from Peirce and are, 
according to James, practically synonymous with Bergson's 
devenir r4el and evolution 



112 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

cused only by our ignorance, and that nothing in 
actual reality corresponds to this notion of in- 
determinateness. The unfolding of events does 
not allow, in their philosophy, for any alterna- 
tives, since it but brings to light, under the form 
of a temporal succession, that which was poten- 
tially fixed at one stroke by the very existence of 
the supreme principle. Whatsoever happens at 
any one moment is necessary, what does not hap- 
pen is impossible; both the necessity and the im- 
possibility are absolute, and there is no room be- 
tween them for either contingency or real possi- 
bility. 

William James was always an enemy of de- 
terminism. At first he was so instinctively, be- 
cause he found that as soon as life ceased to be 
a real combat of uncertain issue, and became a 
preconcerted puppet-show with its denouement 
settled in advance, he was no longer capable of 
taking it seriously. Later, his opposition to de- 
terminism was based on conviction, because, 
partly from arguments of Renouvier and partly 
from a fresh examination of the facts, he came 
to believe firmly in ambiguous futures. In fine, 
his radical empiricism furnished him with the 



TYCHISM 113 

positive basis for tychism in the fact of the free- 
dom of the will ; for the consciousness of bringing 
to pass one out of a number of possibilities is a 
datum as precise and concrete as any other, a 
genuine experience which we have over and over 
again, and one which is accompanied by the im- 
mediate conviction of its objective reality. 

Are we ever, indeed, more keenly aware of 
reality than when we exercise the deliberate 
choice of an alternative and upon this risk our 
future? Of course one can always allege that 
this feeling of a plurality of equally realizable 
possibilities, and of our own free intervention in 
favor of one of them, is illusory. We have no 
experimental means by which to refute the de- 
terminist hypothesis, since we cannot turn back 
the wheels of time and prove that the course of 
events would have been different had we willed 
otherwise. The proof of free-will will never be 
empirically given other than by this inner ex- 
perience of choice, and since the appraisal by 
which we declare this experience true or false 
itself implies a choice, one finds oneself logically 
enclosed in a circle from which there is no exit 
unless by an appeal to an authority other than 



114 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

logic. Thus it has been said that it is by an act 
of liberty that we assert liberty. But those who 
uphold determinism, and consider the feeling of 
the ambiguity of futures and the reality of our 
initiatives to be chimerical, can also not, without 
begging the question, further justify their thesis; 
and it remains a mere parti pris. For it is use- 
less to maintain that the voluntary agent has in 
fact chosen a certain course, because this will 
never prove that he has chosen it of necessity, 
and that he could not have chosen another. 

James was also less concerned with arguing 
directly in favor of free-will, as corroborated by 
inner experience, than he was with refuting the 
often absurd objections of those who deny it. 
When one wants to drown one's dog, one first 
declares him mad, says the proverb. In their 
antipathy to liberty the determinists lay the 
worst crimes at its door. Do they not, indeed, 
go so far as to aver that under free-will there 
would be no uniformities, and that in consequence 
all scientific research might as well be abandoned ! 
" If free-will exists," said one of James's meta- 
physical compatriots, " who knows but that half 
of the inhabitants of London will commit suicide 



TYCHISM 115 

before to-morrow? " James has no trouble in 
refuting such ineptitudes by simply having re- 
course to his concrete method. The possible fu- 
tures between which we choose are in fact limited 
to alternatives which originate in our character 
and our environment, so that our liberty is not 
unrestricted; and whatever event befalls, it will 
always be easy to find antecedents of the same 
sort with which to connect it. This is all that 
science needs to build upon. 

For instance, upon waking in the morning I 
deliberate as to whether I shall lie abed, or get 
up and go to work. What the hypothesis of my 
free-will asserts, in this particular case, is the 
possibility of either action, but by no means that 
of many other imaginary and extravagant de- 
cisions, such as setting fire to my bed or throw- 
ing myself out of the window. And of course my 
liberty, supposing it to be real, to rise or to lie 
abed cannot prevent the learned from yielding 
to their little foible and explaining my conduct 
" scientifically " — ex post facto — by attributing 
it either to my " sense of duty " or to my " in- 
stinctive laziness," both of which certainly existed 
in me before, and have shown their antagonism 



116 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

on many a previous occasion! You see that the 
hypothesis of free-will (or of ambiguous futures, 
the reality of choice, or tychism) would in no 
way involve the downfall of science, as some are 
pleased to suppose, nor make the world any more 
chaotic than it already is. 

At bottom the two rival hypotheses are equally 
irrefutable and equally indemonstrable, because 
they always arise from a personal and extra- 
logical preference for one or other of the two 
mental attitudes, between which we are ever torn 
— the retrospective attitude of cognizing intel- 
lect and the prospective attitude of active life. 
" We live forward, we understand backward." x 
When I look backward to embrace in my thought 
the reality which has already come to pass and 
in which nothing further can be changed, my in- 
tellectual need of simplicity (since I am unable 
to reduce the succession of facts to a purely logi- 
cal identity, which would be ideal) contents itself 
with that construction which seems most economi- 
cal, and so imagines that each event was already 

1 A phrase which originated with the Danish philosopher 
Kierkegaard, was cited by Hoffding, and quoted by James 
in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific 
Methods, 1905, Vol. II, p. 180. 



TYCHISM 117 

virtually contained, without ambiguity, in the 
preceding state of things. Thus I come to sup- 
pose that determinism is the immediately given 
fact, and so, step by step, I finally arrive at 
monism, all the moments of the past seeming to 
telescope themselves, by this same supposed ne- 
cessity, until the whole universe has been com- 
pressed into its starting point or its absolute 
principle. When, on the other hand, I look for- 
ward, at the very moment of making a resolve, 
I feel that the imminent future is still indetermi- 
nate and depends only upon me; it will be what 
I make it by my choosing between the different 
possibilities presented; and in the act of volition 
I am conscious of myself as a free agent and 
creator who, at this point in space and time, 
effectively decides the course of things. 

Which of these two opposing attitudes goes 
deeper and reaches reality itself? The first, is 
always the reply of the intellectualists, for whom 
" to understand " is the main issue and is all that 
makes life worth living. The second, replies 
James, whose energetic temperament, pressing 
ceaselessly forward, and whose radical empiri- 
cism,, ever hostile to abstractions, countenances no 



118 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

doubt in this regard. It is clear that, for him, 
reality, above all things, cannot be found in the 
retrospective field of the intellect, where it is 
retained only in an attenuated conceptual form. 
Reality is found only in the living and prospec- 
tive experience of the immediate present where 
the " I " palpitates, hesitates, deliberates, de- 
cides, acts, and adds its personal contribution, 
its own initiative, to the history of the universe. 
At each point where one out of several possibili- 
ties is realized, something really new is accom- 
plished in the world. Viewed from the outside, 
it is pure chance, good or bad fortune; from the 
inside, it is an act of spontaneity and of creative 
^freedom. 

It is to be noted that these critical points at 
which the curve of future events suddenly turns 
in one direction rather than in another, these 
moments of apparent choice, are not rare or ex- 
ceptional occasions in the course of things but 
are the common rule. At every moment and by 
every one of us the die is being cast and the 
Rubicons, great or small, are being crossed. For, 
according to James, there is everywhere choice 
in life; choice exercised by our organs of sense 



TYCHISM 119 

which seize upon certain forces of the exterior 
world while rejecting others; choice amid the 
chaos of sense-perceptions of which some are 
noted and retained while others are as quickly 
effaced; choice among the many properties of an 
object or the many aspects of a phenomenon; 
choice of that which seems to us essential and 
which we preserve as alone worthy to be counted ; 
choice exercised by our voluntary attention, as it 
surveys the whole field of ideas with which our 
memory or our imagination assails us ; choice in 
art, in science, or in business, of that which has 
value for our purposes; choice, above all, in our 
moral life, of that which we may wish to be, of 
ideals, and of principles which we take for guides 
and to the triumph of which we consecrate our 
strength; choice, consequently, even in philosophy 
and religion, of that which shall be for us reality 
itself. Choice always and everywhere! Man is 
essentially a being who chooses. And by each 
one of these choices a real difference is made in 
the universe, and a portion of the future is de- 
cided; for every choice leaves behind it a fold, 
the beginning of a habit, the dawn of a law, and 
a hint of future states which later choices will 



120 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

confirm and develop, and which it will always be 
more difficult, though always possible, to change 
or to annul by new choices of an opposite sort. 

What a responsibility this doctrine imposes on 
us. It makes of us and of our least thoughts 
not mere links, not passive transmitters of im- 
pulses from outside us in the endless chain of uni- 
versal necessity, but veritable initiators, spon- 
taneous and effective agents in a universe about 
to be created, the final nature of which will be 
determined by our own free decisions. 



VIII 

MELIORISM AND MORALISM 

We must remember, however, that it was not 
merely in order to gratify man by representing 
him as being the captain of his fate that James 
adopted his tychistic doctrine and took the con- 
sciousness of free-will so seriously; but it was 
because of the brute fact that this world is full 
of evil and often disappoints our highest and 
most cherished aspirations. We can hope to bet- 
ter it only if it is still plastic, still in process 
of elaboration, and to some extent capable of 
being molded. Whereas the block-universe is 
essentially immutable, and its spontaneity would 
appear to have been exhausted in that initial act 
by which it brought itself into being. James 
believed that if this world did in fact answer to 
all our needs and did leave nothing to be desired, 
then indeed we should have no objection to its 
being a realm of the most absolute necessity and 
should never dream of coveting a liberty which 
121 



122 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

could only mar our happiness. In a universe of 
such heavenly perfection the most that one could 
ask would be merely, as in the dream of the de- 
terministic monists, to contemplate its unity, so 
sublime and so secure against the unforeseen and 
the disagreeable. But in this world as we act- 
ually experience it this is far from being the 
case. 

Clearly, if the past and the present gave us 
complete satisfaction, it would not occur to us 
to wish for a different future. Surely it is be- 
cause the actual world disappoints us so sorely, 
and forces upon us so much sorrow and confu- 
sion, that we feel the need of transforming and 
improving it. The sense of being able to con- 
i tribute toward such a betterment, and with some 
hope of success in the end, thus becomes the 
secret spring of all our activity as reasonable and 
moral beings. This inducement is lacking in the 
determinist philosophies, which regard the salva- 
tion of the world either as inevitable and neces- 
sary, in the natural course of things, or on the 
other hand as impossible in view of the hopelessly 
evil nature of existence. Between these extremes 
of optimism and pessimism — both fatal to our 



MELIORISM AND MORALISM 123 

moral nature in that they paralyze all effort — 
James chooses the middle course of " meliorism." 
The world, he declares, can be made better. Its 
salvation, although not achieved nor even as yet 
assured, is at least possible, and this possibility 
is not merely an abstract and conceptual one, 
which would interest us little, but is a concrete 
one. It is guaranteed by these two facts: first,* 
that we are here with our ideals, ready to strive ! 
for their realization, and to intervene effectively 
in the world's destiny; second, that this world 
is not a rigid and finished block, but an aggrega- 
tion of independent elements, where nothing pre- 1 
vents us from separating out and eliminating 
what we find evil, so that all trace of it shall 
disappear in that final world toward which we 
strive. 

James's pluralism and tychism may, indeed, 
be implied in his radical empiricism, and freedom 
and contingency may be given in immediate ex- 
perience, but what in his eyes sets the final seal 
of truth on these doctrines is their pragmatic 
value; that is to say, the fact that they are the 
necessary conditions qr fundamental aspects of . 
meliorism. And meliorism is, in its turn, the 



124 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

necessary condition of his moralism. To take 
our moral nature, with all its demands, seri- 
ously — this is the first and last word of James's 
philosophy. The clear destiny of man, as ex- 
perience reveals it, is to be not a passive ob- 
server in a universe in which he can accom- 
plish nothing, but it is rather to assert him- 
self, in the perverse and refractory world which 
surrounds him, by actively imposing his ideals 
(moralism) ; this presupposes, not indeed the 
certainty, but at least the hope and the real 
possibility of success (meliorism) ; and this pre- 
supposes that the course of events should be sus- 
ceptible of true innovations (tychism) ; while 
evil, instead of being inherent in the universe, 
can be expelled from it, as one chance element 
from among many others (pluralism). 

James's moralism and meliorism have many 
aspects which deserve to be brought out. I can 
touch upon only a few of them. In the first place, 
let us remember that James has nowhere defined 
what he would deem to be the rightly ordered 
condition of the universe nor what ideals would 
be realized in such a state. Trusting to each 
one to particularize this according to his bent, 



MELIORISM AND MORALISM 125 

he takes it in a quite general sense to mean a 
state of things which would give us the loftiest 
and most complete satisfactions. To go further 
into details would have been, after all, to outline 
a treatise on morals, a doctrine of the " supreme 
good," and the like. But nothing was more con- 
trary to his anti-dogmatic mental attitude, mind- 
ful as he was of the inexhaustible riches of reality, 
than this idea which so haunts the minds of mor- 
alists, of fixing all too definitely the heirarchy of 
virtue and of good. This seemed to him as ab- 
surd, as fatal to liberty and progress, as it would 
be to promulgate, ne varietur, an a priori outline 
of science. Ethics, like physics, he said, will 
never be completed till the last man has had his 
final experience, and said his last word. Moral r 
life is in a continual state of growth and one must , 
not attempt to confine it in a closed and rigid 
system, which, even were it that of such a genius 
as Epicurus, Kant, or Spencer, would never be 
more than the personal apprehension of its au- 
thor, and would be more or less arbitrary and 
narrow. One cannot absolutely prescribe human i 
conduct, for each concrete moral situation is 1 
something new and unique, defying theoretical re- 



126 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

strictions, and the moral agent must in the last 
resort judge and act on his own account. 

Naturally James does not condemn the at- 
tempts at systematization which philosophers 
may undertake, provisionally, and which at least 
serve the purpose of stimulating reflection. But 
he always distrusted them, fearing lest their nor- 
mative value should be exaggerated and their 
authority, reinforced by the veneration for great 
names, should become an obstacle to the free de- 
velopment and evolution of the moral life. The 
height of virtue, he said, consists in upsetting es- 
• tablished rules which have become too narrow for 
the given case. And one shudders at the thought 
of any pontiff wielding the temporal power and 
imposing his moral system, however excellent, 
upon us. Complete anarchy would be better than 
this strait-jacket, which would soon put an end 
to spontaneity and progress. For the idealistic 
monists, of course, there exists a transcendent 
morality, the eternal and perfect morality of the 
Absolute, who alone knowing all possible desires 
and goods is in a position to classify them im- 
mutably according to their relative importance. 
But since the " Absolute " has not admitted his 



MELIORISM AND MORALISM 127 

votaries into his secrets, they know, as a matter 
of fact, no more about this definitive ethics than 
does any first-comer. The ethics which they 
preach expresses no more than their personal 
feeling, and has no pre-eminent claim on our at- 
tention. Each man's personal intuition on ques- 
tions of moral conduct must be for him the final 
criterion. 1 

Another feature of James's moralism is what 
one may call its heroic character. One gathers 
from all his work the decided impression that if 
he had constructed an ethics it would not have 
leaned toward the Epicurean. Man, in his eyes, 
does not feel himself to be really living except 
in the tonic atmosphere of determined struggle. 
When things are made too easy for us we soon 
lose our spirit. There are in each of us reserves 
of energy which a comfortable and humdrum life 
fails to call out, but which are sometimes awak- 
ened at the touch of the exceptional or the tragic. 
Then it is that we feel really ourselves. For we 
are made for the " strenuous mood," for vigor- 
ous, enthusiastic, and resolute activity. As- 

1 Cf. " The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," in 
The Will to Believe. New York, 1891, pp. 184-215. 



128 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

suredly such tension cannot be continuously 
maintained; there must be times of intermission 
and rest. But it is always to this state of ac- 
tivity and fortitude — to heroism, in a word — 
that we must return if we wish to feel the quick- 
ening contact of reality and to make our mark 
upon it. 

It is thus that William James, the impression- 
able observer and the stanch advocate of peace, 
,of freedom and enlightenment, was at the same 
time an upholder of the warlike virtues; he 
valued courage, devotion, and the endurance of 
severe discipline. He held that since war is no 
longer morally admissible, for reasons of every 
kind, it would be a good thing for our civilization 
to find an educational equivalent, a tonic substi- 
tute to maintain the virility of human kind. This 
indispensable moral equivalent he descried in a 
voluntary simplicity, in the steadfast renuncia- 
tion of the luxuries and superfluities of life, solely 
in the interest of a more untrammeled spiritual 
progress. 1 Here again James did not go into the 

1 See his Varieties of Religious Experience (pp. 367- 
369) and particularly his pamphlet " The Moral Equivalent 
of War" in Memories and Studies (New York, 1911), 
where we find ideas analogous to those of Thury on the 



MELIORISM AND MORALISM 129 

particulars involved by such a reform, and only 
insisted with moving eloquence on the necessity 
of developing heroism. He was aware, indeed, 
that at present any too detailed scheme would be 
theoretical and inopportune, for every one must 
judge from his own point of view what he can 
and ought to do. 

Let us consider one further aspect of melio- 
rism. The outlook which James offers us is singu-t 
larly lofty and disinterested, for it does not> 
assure us that the efforts which it enjoins on us I 
for the amelioration of the world shall be suc-f 
cessful; it merely allows us to hope. This pur- 
pose will be realized only on condition that each 
member of the universe co-operates in it and does 
his individual best. Now there is no guarantee 
that this will be the case. Never mind, said 
James, when our moral nature is healthy it needs 
but hope in order to live and to act; even a 
chance of succeeding in the great work of trans- 
forming the world is enough. For the goal is 
worth the risk and sacrifice even if one were to ] 
fail. 

replacement of military service by a service not less ardu- 
ous, but economically and socially more useful. 



ISO PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

" Suppose," says James, " that the world's au- 
thor put the case to you before creation, saying: 
6 1 am going to make a world not certain to be 
saved, a world the perfection of which shall be 
conditional merely, the condition being that each 
several agent does its own " level best." I offer 
you the chance of taking part in such a world., 
Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real 
adventure, with real danger, yet it may win 
through. It is a social scheme of co-operative 
work genuinely to be done. Will you join the 
procession? Will you trust yourself and trust 
the other agents enough to face the risk ? ' 

" Should you in all seriousness, if participation 
in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound 
to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say 
that, rather than be part and parcel of so funda- 
mentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, 
you preferred to relapse into the slumber of 
nonentity from which you had been momentarily 
aroused by the tempter's voice? 

" Of course if you are normally constituted, 
you would do nothing of the sort. There is a 
healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which 
such a universe would exactly fit. We would 



MELIORISM AND MORALISM 131 

therefore accept the offer — ' Top ! und schlag 
auf schlag!' It would be just like the world 
we practically live in; and loyalty to our old 
nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The 
world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in 
the most living way." 1 

James in no way recoils before the possibility 
of finding himself among those whom the trans- 
formed and bettered world will necessarily re- 
ject. While salvation is, according to optimistic 
monism, essentially universal and complete, like 
the block-universe itself, it can for pluralism 
come about only piecemeal and for each element 
individually, according to the special relations in 
which this element stands to the others. It is - 
possible if not inevitable that this salvation will 
never be complete, certain individuals and objects 
being unfit and having to be excluded from the 
final fabric. Perfection, in other words, is prob- 
ably realizable only at the price of selections, of 
radical sacrifices, and of downright renuncia- 
tions. Such a view is unendurable to many peo- 
ple, who in the final state of the world would 
have everything retained. But it forms a logical 
1 Pragmatism. New York, 1907, pp. 290-391. 



132 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

part of James's moralism and he accepts it with- 
out hesitation. The old Puritans, he said, were 
willing to be damned if that contributed to the 
glory of God. Such greatness of soul on the 
part of the believer should still be ours, and we 
ought, where the salvation of the universe de- 
mands it, to consent to our own annihilation. 
For myself, said James, I believe that this world 
is a real adventure involving positive dangers, 
and nevertheless I do not propose to turn my 
back on it. If I am to suffer shipwreck and 
never to reach the port, still I shall not abandon 
the venture; others will have better fortune, and 
will succeed. It is well worth while to consecrate 
oneself to the moral ideal and to risk one's life 
for its triumph, even though one is not sure of 
coming out saved. 

It is proper, however, to add that with James 
an element of sympathy always tempers what, 
without it, would be a rather frigid stoicism. Nor 
does this detract from the dignity of his ethics; 
it only makes the upward path more accessible 
to natures of a less heroic mold. Judging by 
the manner in which many of our co-laborers ad- 
dress themselves to this work of amelioration, we 



MELIORISM AND MORALISM 133 

might well give up hope at the outset, and mar- 
vel that James should have been able to believe 
in the possibility of a salvation which he recog- 
nized to be conditional on the individual man's 
doing the best he can. For how few there are 
who do this ! If, then, in view of the failures and 
betrayals which crop up at every moment, both 
in us and about us, James did not feel that sal- 
vation was hopelessly doomed to failure, it was 
because he counted on other and more effective 
forces than our own to compensate for the de- 
fections and to make — not indeed certain, since 
that will depend also on us — but at least possi- 
ble, the definite triumph of good. James, in 
short, never ceased to believe that a divine power 
is contributing toward the progress of this world 
and of humanity. This brings us to the subject 
of his Theism. 



IX 

THEISM 

We have said that James's special philosophic 
preoccupation seems to have been to reconcile the 
demands of the moral and religious life with those, 
of science, which latter he had no less at heart, 
and of safeguarding our faith in God from the 
perils with which the growth of reason and the 
attacks of so-called scientific free-thinking seem 
to threaten it. An interesting example of this 
preoccupation is furnished by the title itself of 
one of his first lectures : " Reflex Action and 
Theism" (1881). It required, indeed, James's 
originality to juxtapose two terms which are 
seemingly so unrelated. What connection can 
there be between theism, the philosophical doc- 
trine of a personal God at work in the world, and 
reflex action, the physiological notion of our 
nervous centers being merely an organ of con- 
nection between centripetal and centrifugal 
nerves? Here in a few words is James's answer: 
134 



THEISM 135 

By virtue of the connection between mind and 
body, our mental life should present analogies 
with our nervous system. Now this latter con- 
sists of three parts, so to speak, of which the 
middle one (the reflex centers, including the cere- 
bral cortex) serves to connect the first (the sen- 
sory nerves) with the third (the motor nerves), 
and has for its sole function the transforming of 
stimuli, sent in pell-mell from the periphery, into} 
co-ordinated reactions which are adapted to the, 
needs of the organism. We should expect, there- 
fore, to find a similar teleological arrangement 
in the life of the spirit. This latter comprises 
also three great divisions: sensory perceptions, 
intellectual operations, and voluntary motor 
actions, which, broadly speaking, we call con- 
duct. This amounts to saying that the central 
department, that of the intelligence — which gives 
rise to all our theories and ideas — serves the sole 
function of intermediary between the chaos of 
brute sensations received from the outer world 
and the integrated and rational conduct in which 
our personality expresses itself. 

From this psychological scheme, based on the 
anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, 



186 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

James concludes that our intellectual faculties, 
even in their most abstract manifestation, have 
no other purpose than that of determining con- 
duct, and no other materials than the data of 
experience, and that therefore they must find 
themselves elaborating a conception of the uni- 
verse which corresponds to the perceived facts 
and justifies the conduct. This three-part an- 
alogy constitutes a most ingenious anatomical 
justification of pragmatism as well as of radical 
empiricism and, as you shall see, of theism itself. 
In fact, James has no difficulty in showing that 
the only conception of the universe which gives 
full satisfaction to the deepest emotional and vo- 
litional tendencies of our soul is the theistic con- 
ception. It is therefore the only conception 
which will emerge in genuinely human conduct 
and allow full play to our entire being, with its 
moral needs, its ideal aspirations, and its visions 
of perfection. All philosophies which do not rise 
to a belief in God (such as positivism, agnosti- 
cism, materialism, and naturalism) can serve but 
to paralyze our springs of action. They repre- 
sent the universe as so indifferent or hostile that 
we find ourselves humanly and morally out of 



THEISM 137 

touch with it. How indeed are we to feel any 
devotion or any spark of sympathy and enthu- 
siasm for a reality which is but a congeries of 
atoms, a tangle of blind forces, from which we 
can expect nothing but the ultimate obliteration 
of all that we most value? That is why the in- 
tellect, the central department of our psychical 
life, must come around to theism, if it is to fulfil 
the essentially regulative function which is as- 
signed to it by the doctrine of reflex action, 
namely, to shape our disordered sensory experi- 
ences into a conception of the world which en- 
courages all our aspirations, even the highest, 
and stimulates our greatest activity. 

James did not profess, be it understood, to 
have proved the existence of God. For this it is 
not enough to have shown that this is the only 
hypothesis consistent with the third department 
in our analogy, that of conduct, for it must be 
proved consistent also with the first, that of the 
sense data. Now we are far from having done 
this latter, since it is well known that the sciences 
built on these data do not testify in favor of 
theism. There is, then, between the two terminal 
departments of our nature an opposition, which 



138 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

it is precisely the part of the intelligence to rec- 
oncile by elaborating a philosophy which shall 
harmonize our scientific ideas of the universe with 
our need of a divine being. This is a problem 
upon which all thinkers would do well to labor. 
Until it is solved the existence of God remains 
a mere belief, although a rational and entirely 
legitimate one. 

That is all very well, you will perhaps say, 
but how can we reconcile this faith in God, for 
which James argued so skilfully, with his plu- 
ralism, the very nature of which excludes from 
the universe any first principle, any highest 
unity, any " Absolute," in fact anything which 
the human mind conceives as being of the divine 
nature ? 

Without doubt* if God must possess all these 
sublime qualifications, there is no place for him 
in the philosophy of William James. But must 
he? Let us first determine exactly what we mean 
by God. In order to do this let us appeal with 
James to the pragmatic method, in the hope of 
clearing up our strangely confused idea of the 
divine being, and inquire into the concrete con- 
sequences of this idea in our experience. To 



THEISM 139 

this end let us examine, then, the two principal 
conceptions of divinity which philosophers of- 
fer us. 

The first, the scholastic conception, defines 
God by what are known as his metaphysical at- 
tributes: — unity, aseity and perseity (self-exist- 
ence), infinity, necessity, immutability, and 
others. What concrete effects, what practical 
interest, can such a series of properties have for 
us? Absolutely none. This pompous string of 
long words which so edified the learned doctors 
of the middle ages no longer has real meaning for 
us, so impossible is it to draw from it any con- 
sequence whatsoever for our actual life. There- 
fore you will not be astonished that James dis- 
carded it from the outset, as being devoid of real 
significance. 1 

The second conception is much more interest- 
ing. It is that of idealistic pantheism: God is 
the universal conscience, the omniscient thinker, 

1 " A pretentious sham. ... It means less than nothing, 
in its pompous robe of adjectives" . . . said James with 
regard to the scholastic definition of God, which he quotes 
in the following form : " Deus est Ens, a se, extra et supra 
omne genus, necessarium, unum, infinite perfectum, simplex, 
immutabile, immensum, seternum, intelligens," etc. {Prag- 
matism. New York, 190T, p. 121). 



140 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

the absolute individuality, of which each one of 
us is but an infinitesimal fragment, and which 
includes in the unity of its being the totality of 
possible experiences, just as I include my per- 
sonal feelings and ideas in my own little field of 
consciousness. James had, close at hand, a nota- 
ble representative of this metaphysics in the per- 
son of his colleague and friend, Professor Royce. 1 
But their affection and their mutual esteem could 
not bring about their agreement in philosophy. 
However deeply spiritual and religious the doc- 
trine of Royce may be, it is nevertheless a monism 
whose consequences James was utterly unwilling 
to accept. 

Even from the purely intellectual point of 
view he found its difficulties insurmountable. 
Royce proves, or at least undertakes by dint of 
dialectic subtlety to prove, that God, who in- 
cludes within himself the whole of experience, en- 
joys in one timeless span all felicity, wisdom, 

1 Josiah Royce, professor of the history of philosophy at 
Harvard, was one of the most celebrated contemporary 
American philosophers. Of Royce and absolute idealism 
James has said : " In its essential features, Spinoza was its 
first prophet, Fichte and Hegel were its middle exponents, 
and Josiah Royce is its best contemporary representative." 



THEISM 141 

power, and goodness. But then how comes it that 
with all these perfections he can experience (in 
us who are an integral part of him) those woful 
states of ignorance, misery, and sin which are 
too positive and constant experiences in our life 
for a serious philosopher to allow himself to treat 
them as negligible quantities : on the mere pretext 
that they are only limitations, privations, and 
non-being! How can my curiosity as to the con- 
tents of one small locked drawer be any part of 
God, for whom there are no mysteries? Or how, 
in warfare, can he be immanent in both camps 
and in each one desire his own annihilation in the 
other? These are contradictions from which we 
can escape only by completely distinguishing 
God's point of view from that of finite beings; 
and by continuing with such distinctions until 
we come down to concrete individual objects, and 
thus emerge in pluralism. Thus when, instead of 
contenting oneself with vague formulas, one tries 
to apply idealistic monism to detailed facts it 
becomes unintelligible and collapses. James 
wondered how rationalists, such as Royce and 
other partisans of the " Absolute," could pass 
so easily over logical difficulties by which he had 



142 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

been stopped; while these same proud dialecti- 
cians professed to look down on the empiricist 
and pragmatist as being merely an amateur phi- 
losopher. This seemed to him frivolity, an aber- 
ration of the intellectualist mind, which when in- 
toxicated with abstract principles comes to de- 
spise concrete realities. 

But James found still more serious moral 
objections to pantheism. To be sure he recog- 
nizes that this doctrine has the unique pragmatic 
value of providing its adepts with " moral holi- 
days," by affording them a God whose universal 
immanence will infallibly insure, regardless of 
their own failures and shortcomings, the salva- 
tion of the universe. How comforting for sick 
souls who are bowed down by the sense of their 
own impotence to be able to say that all will 
still be well since nothing happens here below 
without God's consent. But this weak quietism 
lacks zest for energetic and healthy minds which 
see in these " moral vacations " of the pantheists 
merely a confession of indolence. Nevertheless, 
even energetic minds have their moments of lassi- 
tude and discouragement: indeed, there is no one 
so happy as wholly to escape the crushing sense 



THEISM 143 

of inadequacy and failure, which seems to be a 
universal human experience, and for which there 
is no remedy save to fall back on the infinite pity. 
And so most men live by compromise, and con- 
tinually oscillate between morbid and healthy 
moods, that is, between the attitude of religious 
pantheism and that of anti-pantheistic moralism. 
The philosopher who wants to be consistent has 
to choose between these two logically incompati- 
ble conceptions, one implying pluralism, the other 
monism. 1 James chose moralism and remained 
faithful to it, and further proceeded to show that 
this is not irreconcilable with (an anti-panthe- 
istic) religious faith. 

We have seen above (p. 121) that the leading 
consideration in this choice was not so much a 
sense of moral responsibility as it was the prob- 
lem of evil, which cannot be solved by any form 
of monism 2 and is especially fatal to the more 

lu Any absolute moralism is pluralism; any absolute re- 
ligion is a monism," says James in his introduction to The 
Literary Remains of the Late Henry James (Boston, 1884, 
p. 118), where he has described this antinomy with great 
clearness. 

3 Evil can of course not be reconciled with the much 
advertised perfection of the "Absolute," and since for 
monism it is as much a part of the block-universe as is 



144 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

sophisticated varieties. If he was never able to 
reconcile himself to the unconscious substance of 
the naturalistic philosophies, which gives rise to 
evil and good impartially, he could still less ac- 
cept the conscious " Absolute " of idealistic pan- 
theism. The first seemed to him meaningless, but 
the second aroused his moral indignation. For 
would this omniscient and omnipotent being, who, 
comprehending in himself all finite existences, 
countenances and as it were sanctifies by his par- 
ticipation all the abominations and horrors of 
this poor universe, not be more of a monster than 
a God? 

James saw that the empirical reality of pain 
and evil is the rock upon which all the panthe- 
isms shatter, even the more religious ones such 
as that of Royce. No discourse on the beauty 
of nature could make James forget the cruelty 

the good, it cannot be expected ever to disappear. There- 
fore one must either voluntarily close one's eyes to it with 
a fine contempt for facts, or else one must become a 
pessimist. These insoluble difficulties which constitute the 
" problem of evil " disappear in pluralism for which the 
world is, from its origin, an aggregation of independent 
forces of which the good are consequently not responsible 
for the bad, and where one may always hope to be rid of 
the latter by driving them out of the final organization. 



THEISM 145 

found throughout the animal kingdom, and no 
panegyric on divine goodness could blind him to 
human suffering. The diverse tragedies recorded 
in the daily press, — the suicide of the starving 
laborer, the ferocity of the degenerate criminal, 
and the many individual and social injustices and 
miseries, — are not in James's eyes, as in those of 
most readers, melodramatic trifles of the moment, 
but are grave facts, actual ingredients in the 
universe, before which the most celebrated essays 
in theodicy seem to him ironical and impertinent. 
He sees the concrete manifestations of evil arise 
in overwhelming arraignment of the beautiful 
metaphysical systems of the closet philosophers, 
of the official optimism of Leibnitz, of the fatuous 
serenity of those professors who, from their 
cushioned armchairs, demonstrate that every- 
thing is for the best in this best of all possible 
worlds, that evil is but a lesser good, that all 
that is real is rational, and that all is perfect 
in the " Absolute." .... If anything could 
have driven James to exasperation it would have 
been this air of superiority that is assumed by 
idealistic philosophers to the evil which besets us 
on every hand. But he knew that persons so self- 



146 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

satisfied are not to be moved by argument, and 
it only remained for him to record the interesting 
empirical fact that persons claiming to speak in 
the name of absolute reality can be so blinded 
by the perfection of their " Absolute " that they 
do not perceive the concrete evils spread before 
their eyes. The pantheistic conception of God 
no more appealed to James's perspicacity and 
keen common sense than had the old scholastic 
definitions. 

But, you will say, if the absolute and infinite 
God, the God of monotheism, is so repugnant to 
him and seems to him inadmissible, what God 
does he leave for us? Why, plainly, the God of 
all simple religious souls, the God whom they 
could not live without, whose presence is for them 
the source of all joy and of all energy. For in- 
deed there is no need that this " higher presence " 
should be the All as conceived by the pantheist: 
the religious person is wholly satisfied if he feels 
it as a part of the universe, so long as it is the 
most ideal part as well as the most profound, 
and so long as it has sufficient affinities with his 
own moral nature. 

In other words, what we need is a God who 



THEISM 147 

really exists, who is a personality lying outside 
our own, and other than us, — a power not our- 
selves and more powerful than we are ; not a God 
of whom we speak in the neuter gender and in the 
third person, as of some general law, but a God 
whom we address directly and intimately as 
"Thou"; not a distant God enthroned, majestic 
and impassive, on high, but a God who will de- 
scend into the dust and degradation, to suffer 
and to labor there, to join us in our daily strug- 
gle against the powers of evil and all the obsta- 
cles arising in our path, a God who knows and 
appreciates our ideals, and who collaborates with 
us and we with Him to bring about their realiza- 
tion. Now it is not monism, however idealistic it 
be, which can furnish us with such a God; but 
only pluralism. 

The pluralistic and tychistic universe is unfin- 
ished and imperfect ; order is in the painful proc- 
ess of being created, bit by bit, through the 
efforts and voluntary co-operation of certain of 
the members. But such, James felt, is the uni- 
verse that experience reveals to us, and moreover 
no other sort of universe would afford the op- 
portunity for moral action ; in no other could we 



148 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

hope to meet, amid all the various individuali- 
ties there congregated, that powerful and sym- 
pathetic Helper and Companion of whom our 
heart has need, that personal and living God to 
whom our soul aspires. 

But is He to be found there? This is a ques- 
tion of fact to which James's radical empiricism 
enabled him to give an affirmative answer. For if 
all that is experienced is real there is nothing 
more real than God, as the whole religious life 
of humanity bears witness. The study that 
James had made of this domain convinced him 
that there exist specific and distinct experiences, 
impossible to deduce from the ordinary facts of 
psychology, which testify to the unexpected in- 
tervention in our so-called natural world of a 
supernatural and divine reality, — the same in 
essence as that which is best in us, but infinitely 
superior. The typical example of these special 
interventions, which pure logic or natural science 
could never have foreseen, is found in those re- 
markable cases of individuals who, halted at the 
brink of some utter moral failure, suddenly find 
themselves invaded, dominated, and uplifted by 
a marvelous vitalizing power which bears them 



THEISM 149 

on to victory. The sudden conversions witnessed 
by evangelical Christianity, the extraordinary 
mental and physical healings of the American 
sects of mind-cure, faith-healing, etc., are the 
most impressive indications of the existence, in 
and about us, of a sphere of reality which re- 
mains unsuspected by physics or indeed by ordi- 
nary ethics ; a sphere of which we touch only the 
periphery, and which is to our, daily human ex- 
istence somewhat as that is to the life of our 
domestic animals. Our dogs and cats share some 
of our humbler interests, such as the need for 
food and shelter, but how are they to understand 
the mysterious occupations of reading, writing, 
or conversing, at which they see us busied for 
hours at a time? What can they comprehend of 
such activities? In the same way our religious 
experience brings us in contact with modes and 
zones of existence to which we feel that our own 
spiritual ideals somehow naturally appertain, but 
into which it. is impossible for us to penetrate 
very far, so greatly does this domain of the 
higher powers surpass our comprehension. 

The sudden reformations of character to 
which I have just alluded are often accompanied 



150 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

by nervous crises, visions, and other dramatic 
circumstances, but these are only the more strik- 
ing instances of an untiring superhuman inter- 
vention which can also be discovered working 
through all our daily life. These subtle and less 
tangible manifestations are experienced in the 
intimate life of innumerable souls, and, though 
less easily remarked by others, they are by rea- 
son of their pervasiveness and frequent repetition 
even more convincing to the one who experiences 
them. This is actually the religious experience 
again, though it is less commonly recognized as 
such, and it varies extraordinarily in different 
persons. 

" Among the peculiarities of this experience," 
says M. Emile Boutroux, in summing up James, 
" may be noted: — the essential and unshaken joy- 
ousness of the spirit; the healing of moral and 
physical illnesses that is brought about by the 
abandonment of self to the all-powerful divine 
bounty; the consciousness of sin and the moral 
suffering which we feel to be due to causes over 
which we have no control ; the secret unrest of 
the soul, which is conscious within itself of many 
warring personalities that it cannot bring into 



THEISM 151 

accord; the conversion which, whether sudden or 
gradual, substitutes for a given personality an- 
other quite different and incomparably superior; 
the saintliness which makes toward a permanent 
and a more than human perfection; the mystical 
spiritual life in which man, while remaining him- 
self, has the consciousness of living the very life 
of God; the prayer which in supernatural ways 
modifies the course of our thoughts and of 
things. 

" In experiencing these different phenomena 
the individual is aware of entering into relation 
with powers conscious and personal like himself, 
but immeasurably superior to his own nature. 
He perceives that while experiencing the religious 
emotion his life is transformed, ennobled, and ani- 
mated by an enthusiasm, a power for heroism, 
and a confidence of success of which in himself 
he was incapable; and he is naturally led to 
the conviction that the being who in this 
manner has heard, understood, helped, and cured 
him, and created in him a new personality, 
is a consciousness, an actual person akin to 
himself. 

" Such is the religious consciousness ; it is the 



152 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

human consciousness endowed with the conviction 
that it is communicating with God." x 

Persons who have experienced this communion 
with God remain unshakable as to the value of 
the evidence. They are persons of a somewhat 
mystical temperament, and their conviction can- 
not generally be imparted to rationalistic tem- 
peraments who, not having had personally the 
experience in question, can always treat it as an 
illusion or error. Although James affirms that 
by nature he cannot enter into the point of view 
of the mystics, and often has difficulty in under- 
standing their testimony, he takes his stand 
nevertheless on their side, because he sees no rea- 
son, as a radical empiricist, to question imme- 
diate experiences so uniform and so prevalent 
through the whole history of humanity. The 
field of experience is too vast, and reality too 
rich and varied, for one single individual to pre- 
tend to embrace the whole of it himself; and 
where should we be if in other matters we relied 
only on what we ourselves have directly experi- 
enced? That is why, even while recognizing that 

1 E. Boutroux: William James. English translation, New- 
York, 1912, p. 50. 



THEISM 153 

mystical or religious experience has little that is 
convincing or " authoritative " for those to 
whom it has not been vouchsafed, James does 
not hesitate to consider it and on the whole 
to accept its testimony; the more so, perhaps, 
since this testimony squared entirely with 
his philosophy and with his personal inclina- 
tions. 

You may well believe that in attributing re- 
ligious phenomena to God's actual self-revelation 
James did not fail to bring upon himself much 
condemnation. The ultra-knowing have, in the 
name of science, raised two objections. Firstly, 
they say, it is in these days inadmissible to bring 
God, or anything supernatural or miraculous, 
into the course of mundane events, which, as 
every one knows, is governed solely by the general 
laws of nature. And secondly, they say that the 
facts adduced are drawn merely from the experi- 
ence of devotees, and are easily explained by the 
discoveries of modern psycho-pathology in the 
field of subconscious phenomena; so that one 
must indeed be blinded by superstition to see any- 
thing at all divine in this medley of hallucina- 
tions, ecstasies, and morbid symptoms of all 



154 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

kinds, which appear to fill the lives of religious 
persons. 

This second objection scarcely holds good. 
For although James himself was one of the first 
to point out the role which subconsciousness 
plays in religion he nevertheless saw clearly 
that the ultimate problem remains untouched 
thereby. It is precisely through the subcon- 
scious, he says, that all these experiences of sal- 
vation reach the religious soul, and so on that 
fundamental fact religion and science quite 
agree. 1 But what is there then beyond the sub- 
conscious? Science is silent on this point; it 
cannot make sure. The subliminal is a conjurer's 
sack from which science has produced much, but 

1 It is interesting to note the close agreement in regard 
to the psychology of religion between two thinkers as orig- 
inal and independent of each other as were William James 
and the late Genevese theologian, Cesar Malan (1821-1899). 
Before the discovery of subliminal psychology, and earlier 
than the American philosopher, Malan had come through 
independent reflection to consider the subconscious (which 
he called "the unconscious principle of our being") to be 
the direct source of all individual religious experience — 
from the simple feeling of moral obligation to the most 
esoteric experiences of the Christian life — and the necessary 
intermediary through which divine action makes itself felt 
in the personal consciousness. (Cf. G. Fulliquet: La PensSe 
thtologique de Cesar Malan, Robert, Geneva, 1902, p. 286.) 



THEISM 155 

it cannot explore this sack to the bottom nor 
make sure that it has no hole which would allow 
the passage of strange forces. Here then re- 
ligion does not contradict science, but only ven- 
tures beyond it with an hypothesis which assumes 
that the individual subliminals are continuous 
with a sphere of reality where they come in direct 
contact either with one another (as the phe- 
nomena of telepathy would seem to indicate) or 
with higher powers which are the real source of 
the inner experiences of the believer. These ex- 
periences become tinged or molded in different 
ways in their passage through the subliminal. 
Hence the personal modifications, so various and 
often indeed so pathological, which they have un- 
dergone by the time they enter consciousness, and 
which must not obscure the essential fact that 
nevertheless in these experiences the divine power 
is working to replenish and revive. James recog- 
nizes that this hypothesis of the super-individual 
origin of religious experience, which constitutes 
the common belief of all religions, is not a part 
of science; but neither is it, on the other hand, 
anti-scientific, thanks to the role of connecting 
link which from now on the subliminal plays be- 



156 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

tween the observable phenomena and that of their 
inscrutable ultimate sources. It is accordingly 
permissible for every one to think about this as 
he pleases; just as, if he once admits this funda- 
mental religious belief, it is further permissible 
for him to add to it his own over-beliefs con- 
cerning the more exact constitution of the divine 
world, at his own risk, of course, and without 
imposing them upon others. 

As to the objection that it is inadmissible on 
principle to resort to " God " for the explana- 
tion of this or that particular occurrence, since 
everything takes places strictly according to nat- 
ural laws, — this would apply to James's position 
if his God represented the " Absolute " or the 
first cause, as does the " universal Being " of 
monism, which, as the " one and only " source 
from which everything flows, could not manifest 
himself at certain junctures in the course of 
things rather than at others. But let us not 
forget that in James's pluralistic universe God 
is but an individual and finite being, and all 
spiritual realities are particular and concrete 
experiences, as is everything else that exists. 
The special interventions of the divinity in the 



THEISM 157 

life of the believer, the miracles, in short the 
" crass " supernaturalism which James squarely 
acknowledges ( as opposed to the " refined " 
supernaturalism of the idealistic monists in 
whose eyes God is equally revealed everywhere, 
which is equivalent to nowhere), all this, al- 
though it is simply scandalizing to the intellee- 
tualist mind, has nothing shocking about it for 
a philosophy that takes account only of experi- 
ence. Why should not the divine realities, if they 
exist, intervene of their own accord in the human 
world, just as this latter intervenes in the world 
of animals ? And as to the perennial " laws " of 
science it goes without saying that, for James as 
for all true empiricists, they are nothing more 
than abstract formulae, save in the concrete in- 
stances where they find themselves realized. 
These laws merely approximately express the 
usual relations of things to one another, and the 
usual sequences, but in no sense do they represent 
a necessity hovering over reality to prevent its 
moving out of its accustomed grooves. The mon- 
istic dogma of the uniformity of events, or of 
the fatality of natural laws, loses all absolute 
authority in pluralism and in tychism, where it 



158 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

falls to the level of a working hypothesis which 
is good only so long as it comes true, but is no 
shibboleth to oppose to any new evidence which 
may be presented by concrete facts. 

There remains a last objection, but it is a 
wholly philosophical one. This is that the re- 
ligious experience of the presence or influence of 
God within oneself would not prove his independ- 
ent existence; for no one can step out of his 
own consciousness in order to ascertain whether 
there is anything beyond it, and one would 
strangely delude oneself in taking purely subjec- 
tive experiences, no matter how vivid and impres- 
sive they may be, as proof of an external reality. 
This objection, which is raised by solipsistic 
idealism, is to be sure irrefutable, but since it 
strikes equally at our belief in the objective real- 
ity of our fellow-men and in fact of everything 
else whatsoever, including our own past, nobody 
takes it seriously (see above, page 105). William 
James, convinced realist that he was, had no more 
difficulty in accepting the objective existence of 
God than of anything else, from the moment that 
a genuine human experience bore witness thereto. 
And as for the mysterious nature of the inter- 



THEISM 159 

action, or the more or less profound communion 
between the personality of the believer and that 
of the divinity, we have seen that this problem 
existed no more for the founder of radical em- 
piricism than did the problem of the existence 
of individual streams of consciousness ; for the 
relations, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, of 
beings to one another, do not have to be logically 
explained — to attempt which would be meaning- 
less — but simply ascertained and reported as 
they appear in immediate experience. 

In admitting the reality of God as attested by 
the facts, moreover, James did not pretend to 
have solved the whole mystery, and in view of 
our present ignorance he rather freely uses vari- 
ous expressions for God, such as the gods, the 
divine world, higher or invisible powers, the su- 
persensible sphere, and other variants. But on 
one point he is certain, — that God is at the very 
least a conscious and a moral being, for it is thus 
that he reveals himself in the most marked cases 
of religious experience : and how, moreover, could 
it be otherwise in a pluralistic universe consisting 
entirely of individual existences? Can one con- 
ceive of anything more contrary to James's con- 



160 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

crete method than the intellectualist mania, of 
the theologians and philosophers, for attenuating 
God until nothing is left but a general idea, a 
category such as the " good " or the " perfect," 
an impersonal and abstract law, or a moral order 
apart from human consciousness and floating 
in the aether of pure reason! 

The question as to whether the divine personal- 
ity is one, as monotheism asserts, or whether it is 
many, is one which James does not decide. If 
many, this need not be in the likeness of the 
pagan divinities, always warring with another, 
but it might be in the sense of a society or heir- 
archy of spiritual beings, living in perfect har- 
mony although of diverse individualities and rank. 
James rather inclines toward the second alter- 
native, 1 which is more in conformity with his plu- 
ralistic philosophy. And in any case, if God is 
one, he is neither infinite nor absolute (as he is 
for monism), but he is a finite consciousness, like 
ourselves except more comprehensive, outside of 
which there will always remain others to consti- 
tute an external environment to him. 

1 Cf. his lecture " Concerning Fechner " {A Pluralistic 
Universe. New York, 1909, Lecture IV, pp. 131-177). 



THEISM 161 

" The ideal power with which we feel ourselves 
in connection, the * God ' of ordinary men, is, both 
by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed 
with certain of those metaphysical attributes 
which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with 
such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of 
course to be ' one and only ' and to be ' infinite ' ; 
and the notion of many finite gods is one which 
hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, 
and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the in- 
terests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to 
say that religious experience, as we have studied 
it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting 
the infinitist belief. The only thing that it un- 
equivocally testifies to is that we can experience 
union with something larger than ourselves and 
in that union find our greatest peace. Philoso- 
phy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism, 
with its monoideistic bent, both s pass to the 
limit ' and identify the something with a unique 
God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. 
Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, 
follows the example which they set. 

" Meanwhile the practical needs and experi- 
ences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by 



162 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion 
continuous with him there exists a larger power 
which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All 
that the facts require is that the power should 
be both other and larger than our conscious 
selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be 
large enough to trust for the next step. It need 
not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might 
conceivably even be only a larger and more god- 
like self, of which the present self would then be 
but the mutilated expression, and the universe 
might conceivably be a collection of such selves, 
of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no ab- 
solute unity realized in it at all. Thus would 
a sort of polytheism return upon us, . . . which, 
by the way, has always been the real religion of 
common people, and is so still to-day." * 

This polytheism of James's may have scandal- 
ized some people ; but it must be remembered that 
he insists only that it is an hypothesis which is 
perfectly reconcilable with the facts of religious 
experience, and this particularly in order to 
show how permeated the current doctrines are 

1 The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York, 1902, 
pp. 524-526. 



THEISM 163 

by useless monistic and intellectualistic meta- 
physics. It is doubtless for the same reason that 
he explicitly says that he cannot accept " popu- 
lar Christianity " and agrees rather with the 
Buddhistic doctrine according to which the moral 
order of the world resides in the facts themselves, 
every one of our actions carrying with it its own 
reason and its own sanction just as every cause 
produces, inevitably, its effect. It is clear that 
this way of understanding the deep moral signifi- 
cance of the universe is much more in keeping 
with James's concrete and realistic habit than 
is our traditional view as embodied in the Cate- 
chism, where the great moral facts are deduced 
from the cosmic drama of the creation, fall, 
atonement, last judgment, etc. ; events taking 
place in who knows what abstract sphere, so re- 
mote is it from the concrete scene of our daily 
lives. But it is none the less evident that our 
philosopher's religious moralism with its infusion 
of heroism, enthusiasm, and energy, and his be- 
lief in a personal God, are utterly different from 
the subdued, resigned, and completely atheistic 
attitude of authentic Buddhism. 

I do not hesitate to describe James's person- 



164. PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

ality and philosophy as purely Christian in 
spirit, although in spite of his sympathy for 
every sincere and living faith his dislike of for- 
mulae caused him to remain uncommitted to any 
of the orthodox and established creeds. He often 
uses the expression " we Christians," and the 
manner in which he describes and appreciates 
saintliness and the religious life shows how well 
he understood the deeper emotions of the great 
figures of Christianity. 

Finally, although James's philosophical ideas 
are certainly far removed from those of ordinary 
theologians, they are in at least as good, and are 
often in much better accord with the spirit of the 
Scriptures. Was not Christ in a sense the first 
pragmatist when he declared that " by their 
fruits ye shall know them," and that the truth of 
his doctrine was to be judged by putting it in 
practice? Did he ever treat the problem of evil 
other than pluralistically; quite as James treats 
it? Surely Christ did not teach that God is an 
" Absolute " that includes and condones all the 
evils and miseries of this world, but rather that 
He is the Father, the great Ally who desires our 
welfare and who demands only our co-operation 



THEISM 165 

in resisting and casting out all evil. If you re- 
flect a moment, I think you will at once recognize 
that James's theism remains true in fundamentals 
to evangelical theism, although it is obviously at 
variance with those ideas of God that are found 
among average church-goers. It would be elab- 
orating the obvious to dwell longer on the justi- 
fication of views which, heterodox as they are, 
have been so ably supported among us a few years 
ago by so notable a Christian as Wilfred Monod. 1 
In leaving this subject I would point out once 
more that the great idea which dominates James's 
religious moralism, — that human effort and divine 
power must collaborate for the salvation of the 
world, — is after all no more than a development 
of the thought of the apostle : " we are laborers 
together with God." 

1 W. Monod: Un Athe'e, Contribution a la re forme d'une 
certaine idee de Dieu. St.-Blaise, 1904. Arguing from the 
autobiography of Jefferies (1883) and from other cases, 
Monod comes to reject the traditional ideas of the omni- 
presence and omnipotence of God and comes out with con- 
ceptions that are quite akin to those of James. 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 

Some one may suggest here that although 
James's moral and religious philosophy is cer- 
tainly a very elevated one, yet in spite of its 
great merits it is, after all, in the same case with 
all other philosophical systems. None of them 
can ever be completely demonstrated : thev remain 
hypotheses and more or less fictions. 

Of course James has not deceived himself in 
this respect. He did not profess to " demon- 
strate " the truth of his conception of the world. 
Every man possesses, he believed, some funda- 
mental attitude towards the universe and life, 
some individual way of feeling and of reacting, 
which is his philosophy. It is only with a few 
that this attitude or this vision of things is pre- 
cise enough to translate itself into ideas or defi- 
nite formulas. It is, in short, only in rare and 
specially organized minds that this work of intel- 
lectual elaboration grows into a coherent system, 
166 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 167 

that is, a reasoned structure of doctrine. How- 
ever highly perfected they may be, these ra- 
tional constructions that are known as philo- 
sophic systems are still only secondary products 
derived from our primitive and spontaneous in- 
tuition. This inarticulate intuition comes first, 
but soon learns to protect itself under the guise 
of an articulate philosophy. Now this armor is 
neither flawless nor in itself a source of power. 
The primitive and spontaneous attitude, the in- 
ner intuitive resolve, the will to believe, is always 
required to make a vital personal conviction and 
certainty out of what, from a strictly logical 
point of view, would be only desideratum and hy- 
pothesis. 

The will to believe! To have recognized this 
element in every philosophy and to have pro- 
claimed its legitimacy against all who disputed 
or deprecated it is, in my opinion, the greatest 
service which James has done us. It is also one 
of the most inspired observations that have gone 
into the structure of pragmatism. 

To the mind of intellectualist thinkers noth- 
ing could be more foolish or disastrous than 
to assign to faith and to volition (notoriously 



168 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

at the service of personal interest, desire, pas- 
sion and, in short, of the most subjective elements 
of our nature) any part whatever in the elabora- 
tion of philosophy, whose goal is the purely ob- 
jective and impersonal ascertainment of truth. 
Rationalists or positivists are all of one accord 
in condemning faith, which is merely the belief in 
something which we deeply need and for which 
we hope, is, in short, aspiration. Even if this 
aspiration and this anticipation should be ulti- 
mately justified, they are none the less declared 
illegitimate, and unworthy of any enlightened 
being. Huxley maintained that one should never 
admit anything not prescribed by reason, and he 
considered any form of faith to be a moral de- 
linquenc}'. If a belief, said Clifford, has been 
accepted without purely intellectual and conclu- 
sive proof, the satisfaction we take in it is a 
piece of self-indulgence, an infidelity to the human 
intellect, and a relapse into superstition. In 
short, it is bad at any time, anywhere, and for 
any one, to entertain a belief on insufficient evi- 
dence. 

You see we are forbidden to let our preferences 
or even our noblest aspirations influence our be- 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 169 

liefs. Science alone must determine these. There 
is something imposing in this jealous care with 
which the intellectualists reserve to ratiocination, 
quite to the exclusion of Pascal's " reasons of the 
heart," the sole right to participate in framing 
our conception of the universe. But you may- 
rest assured that James, having discovered that 
intellectualism always leads its partisans, when 
they are logical, to skeptical or monistic conclu- 
sions which are conspicuously unfavorable to the 
moral and religious life, devoted himself to re- 
futing this point of view. He does this with his 
usual intrepidity and vigor by borrowing from 
the intellectualists their own weapons, that is to 
say, by convicting them of self-contradiction, and 
showing that their means of getting at truth ex- 
poses them to the risk of missing it altogether: 
You assert that we ought to believe only what 
we can demonstrate ; but where have you ever 
found or given a demonstration of this principle 
itself? That is merely a prejudice like any other, 
dictated by your personal preference, your 
purely subjective sentiment, and, namely, by your 
-fear of error which surpasses your desire for 
truth* Unquestionably, if our first human duty 



170 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

were to avoid falling into error, you would be 
right, and we ought to hold nothing as true which 
has not first been perfectly established. But if it 
is our destiny to do everything we can to arrive 
at truth, even at the risk of making mistakes, 
then your rule presents itself as a fatal hindrance. 
Furthermore, is it not insincere to advocate a 
rule whose application would obviously make for 
the paralysis of scientific research, human enter- 
prise, and progress? Where is the scholar, the 
statesman, the man of affairs, or the private citi- 
zen who does not every day, even at the risk of 
disappointment, speculate on the future; who 
does not indeed live by faith, relying on facts as 
yet unproved and believing firmly in the success 
of his experiments and undertakings? And how 
many doubtful and obscure predicaments there 
are in which we are forced to take sides, and in 
which the mere act of withholding our support 
from one of two undemonstrable hypotheses 
amounts to favoring the other one exactly as 
much as if we had actually embraced it! Our 
moral and social life constantly subjects us to 
this choice. How are we to judge questions of 
value, that is to say questions of what ought to 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 171 

be, if we insist on restricting ourselves to the ver- 
dicts of science which inform us only concerning 
what is 9 And in the end does not science itself 
rest on purely sentimental motives? The most 
positivist scholars are assuredly governed by 
" reasons of the heart " when they lay down the 
law that the verification of facts and the correc- 
tion of false ideas constitute for man the highest 
good; for if you question this doctrine, they can- 
not prove but will only reassert it. At the very 
best they may point out that verification and 
correction lead always to results which gratify 
man's needs, once more, of the heart. 

Finally, this unfortunate caveat which is put 
on faith rests on the intellectualist supposition of 
a finished universe, independent of ourselves, of 
which we can only take passive cognizance and 
in which our initiative is futile. But this is an 
unfounded supposition, and is indeed refuted by 
innumerable cases in which faith creates its own 
object and contributes toward its own realiza- 
tion. The mountain climber facing a terrible 
crevasse may succeed in jumping it if he believes 
that he can, but he will surely fall short and be 
dashed to pieces, or else starve to death at the 



172 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

brink, if he doubts his own strength. In the same 
way any one takes a risk who puts confidence in 
a stranger, but at the same time one stands the 
chance of making a friend of some one who, ex- 
cept for one's own overtures, would always have 
remained unfeeling and indifferent. Perhaps it 
is the same with this universe. What we hope and 
believe of it together with what our beliefs, even 
the philosophical ones, inspire us to set to work 
to accomplish, is unquestionably a part of its 
reality. But do such parts figure as passive fac- 
tors with no influence on the rest, or rather are 
they not like an active ferment working to 
leaven the entire mass and contributing to shape 
its future? The intellectualists do not hesitate 
to accept the former hypothesis, and yet it 
is very far from being proved; and if the sec- 
ond should be the true one, they would some 
day come to see that, paralyzed by their own 
theory, they had deprived themselves of all active 
participation in the process of molding reality. 
It is accordingly by a flagrant begging of the 
question, or else by an unjustifiable bias, that 
intellectualism would forbid our believing in any- 
thing beyond the known. Not only, as a matter 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 173 

of fact, is voluntary belief practised without mis- 
givings by the very ones who would forbid it to 
others, but it is in fact indispensable to all prog- 
ress; and when the essential nature of the uni- 
verse is in question, the act of faith is the more 
legitimate in that it may itself contribute to de- 
termine this nature. Besides, it goes without 
saying that in this domain of the unproved every 
man is free to form his own opinions on his own 
responsibility, even though he may some day find 
himself to have been in error. 

But it is exactly this mental freedom which 
alarms the strict doctrinaires. This amounts, 
they say, to allowing people to believe what they 
wish! And this would open wide the door to 
superstition, to the worst abuses of libertarianism, 
and to every form of licentiousness. James does 
not deny these possible dangers but he is not 
daunted by them, knowing well that humanity 
makes progress only by much groping and at 
the cost of innumerable false starts. We should 
get nowhere without these tentative experiments, 
from which experience makes its selection and 
saves only what is found to be valuable. How 
many once flourishing philosophical and religious 



174 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

hypotheses have perished with time, like the gods 
of Olympus and the tortures of hell! We must 
not, then, fear freedom; mistakes and excesses 
automatically correct themselves in the great test 
of time. 

I need hardly say, after the preceding chap- 
ters, that it is in favor of the live religious hy- 
pothesis, in the broadest yet most practical sense 
of the term, that James exercises this inalienable 
right to choose that which he will hold to be true. 
" I, therefore, for one," he says, " cannot see 
my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth- 
seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing na- 
ture out of the game." And so his phrase will to 
believe becomes almost synonymous with religious 
faith. He means by it an assent that is not 
purely platonic and intellectual, but decided, en- 
thusiastic and practical, — an assent to the reality 
of a divine power which has the same moral ideal 
as we, and which needs our cooperation in work- 
ing toward the salvation of the world. This re- 
ligious belief, this volitional as well as intellectual 
choice, is the only one which gives our life a 
worthy aim and a significance, or can awaken in 
us that " strenuous mood " without which life 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 175 

would lose all pungency. And James believes 
that this faith is of such vital importance to the 
universe, as well as to ourselves, that nobody 
should be for a moment deterred by the arbitrary 
veto imposed by intellectualist philosophers. 

" This feeling, forced on us we know not 
whence, that by obstinately believing that there 
are gods (although not to do so would be so easy 
both for our logic and our life) we are doing the 
universe the deepest service we can, seems part 
of the living essence of the religious hypothe- 
sis .. . When I look at the religious ques- 
tion as it really puts itself to concrete men> and 
when I think of all the possibilities which both 
practically and theoretically it involves, then this 
command that we shall put a stopper on our 
heart, instincts, and courage, and wait — acting 
of course meanwhile more or less as if religion 
were not true — till doomsday, or till such time 
as our intellect and senses working together may 
have raked in evidence enough, — this command, 
I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manu- 
factured in the philosophic cave . . . Since 
belief is measured by action, he who forbids us 
to believe religion to be true necessarily also for- 



176 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

bids us to act as we should if we did believe it to 
be true." x 

" What the more characteristically divine 
facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy 
in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know 
not. But the over-belief on which I am ready 
to make my personal venture is that they ex- 
ist .. . By being faithful in my poor measure 
to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more 
sane and true . . . Who knows whether the 
faithfulness of individuals here below to their own 
poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in 
turn to be more effectively faithful to his own 
greater tasks ? " 2 

" I confess that I do not see why the very 
existence of an invisible world may not in part 
depend on the personal response which any one 
of us may make to the religious appeal. God 
himself, in short, may draw vital strength and 
increase of very being from our fidelity. For 
my own part, I do not know what the sweat and 
blood and tragedy of this life may mean, if they 

1 The Will to Believe. New York, 1903, pp. 29-30. 
a The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York, 
1902, p. 519. 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 177 

mean anything short of this. If this life be not 
a real fight, in which something is eternally 
gained for the universe by success, it is no better 
than a game of private theatricals from which 
one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a 
real fight, — as if there were something really wild 
in the universe which we, with all our idealities 
and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and 
first of all to redeem our own hearts from 
atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half- 
saved universe our nature is adapted." L 

These few quotations, and I could multiply 
them indefinitely, will show the value which James 
sets on religious faith, and the importance he 
assigns to a persjstent and heroic attitude of de- 
termination. I hold that this point is perhaps 
the most important in all his philosophy for in- 
tellectual men (I do not say intellectualists!), 
and that there is nothing for which we owe him 
deeper gratitude than for the emphasis which he 
puts on the will to believe, supported as this is 
by his own personal example. Let me amplify 
this a bit further. The cultivated minds of our 
day can be roughly divided as regards religion 
1 The Will to Believe, p. 61. 



178 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

into three categories. First, there are the privi- 
leged souls. Thanks to their naturally religious 
temperaments and to the favorable concurrence 
of circumstance (often tragic) they have been 
granted intimate experiences of a more or less 
mystical order, which bring them " absolute cer- 
titude." They have experienced the direct inter- 
vention of God in their own lives. Henceforth, 
whatever befalls, they are safe from doubt and 
one can almost say they walk, not by faith but 
by sight. They are greatly to be envied. 

At the other extreme are to be found those 
positive minds who are entirely immersed in the 
daily humdrum and for whom the science or the 
business of this world is all-sufficing, Sometimes 
aggressive, sometimes indifferent toward the faith 
of others, to them religion is a dead issue, a ques- 
tion which is disposed of as being among the su- 
perstitions of the past. They, too, are safe from 
doubt. They are greatly to be pitied. 

Between these two extremes is the great mass, 
to which most of us probably belong, for whom 
the religious problem is always there, and is, at 
times, more or less poignant. We would fain find 
a stable and satisfying solution. But we never 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 179 

reach it, torn as we are between allegiance to the 
faith of our fathers, and also to the modern ideal 
of scientific certitude from which we cannot free 
ourselves, and to which the old answers and 
apologia^ so satisfying to our forebears, are un- 
fortunately no longer adequate. 

Consider the Christian tenets in which we have 
been brought up. On the one hand, we vaguely 
feel the inestimable value of their content, and all 
that the individual, society, and civilization at 
large would lose in exchanging them for material- 
istic and atheistic free-thought. On the other 
hand, we no longer know just how far to credit 
the documents, claiming to be historic, on which 
they rest. In the face of our many scientific 
discoveries, — from the " higher criticism " of the 
Scriptures to, say, paleontology and embryology 
which are constantly reinforcing the purely nat- 
uralistic conception of the universe, — the author- 
ity of the Scriptural tradition seems singularly 
shaken, nor can we in any degree foretell how 
much of it will survive. It is possible, to be sure, 
that our descendants may finally recover their 
religious attitude, in case another turn of the 
wheel of science restores our confidence (through 



180 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

new discoveries or interpretations) on points 
which are questioned to-day. But until that day 
comes, and it may never come, we are in a tight 
place. We are indeed told that there are moral 
considerations which dominate all others ; but the 
evidence in questions of morals often seems ex- 
ceedingly obscure. And we feel that there is, 
above all, the further question of sincerity: as- 
suredly we would gladly enough go where our 
hearts lead us and embrace the Christian faith; 
but to believe is to affirm to be true, and it will 
always be repugnant to the conscience of an hon- 
est man, above all if he has been at all influenced 
by the scientific method, to affirm as true things 
of which he is uncertain, and which he is not in 
a position to demonstrate. Such is the dilemma 
in which we find ourselves. 

Well, it is just here that William James comes 
to our aid, and places the religious question on 
its true ground by showing us that the essence 
of faith is not feeling or intellect, but will. It is 
not a question of lacking sincerity or of allowing 
oneself to affirm as true things of which one is 
uncertain; but it is a question of willing some- 
thing whose reality has been and as yet can be, 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 181 

scientifically, neither proved nor refuted. It is 
not, then, a question of sincerity but of calling 
things by their right names, not of saying that 
one knows when one does not know, but of frankly 
recognizing that one wills; and that though one 
may be wrong, one is quite resolved to take the 
risk. Feeling, then, is nothing but the starting 
point of an act of faith, and intellect is merely 
one of its instruments ; the act of faith itself, the 
will to believe, is something sui generis which per- 
tains to neither the one nor the other. Thus it 
might happen, for instance, that in spite of the 
suspicious behavior of a lifelong friend, and the 
apparently well-founded accusations against him, 
we should still trust our inner feeling, and decide 
to hold him innocent until he was absolutely 
proved guilty; and to guarantee his probity even 
though he might later be proved guilty and we 
be forced to acknowledge ourselves duped. In 
another domain and on a different scale this is 
the attitude of religious faith toward the universe. 
Faith steadfastly trusts the universe in spite of 
its enveloping mystery and its threatening as- 
pects, and persists in crediting life with a deep 
moral significance. It resolutely confides in the 



182 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

divine being whom it presages, and goes ahead, 
taking the risk and prepared to pay in person. 
It is a true parti pris, in the best sense of the 
word, as the late Ernest Martin said, whose point 
of view here coincides entirely with that of 
James. 1 

What is your objection to this voluntary re- 
solve which religion demands of us? That you do 
not wish to take the chance of being deceived, or 
risk having believed and acted in vain? So be it. 
No power constrains you; religion is precisely 
an affair of free personal choice. But while your- 
self taking a stand that is inwardly and out- 
wardly opposed to it (since neutrality is practi- 
cally impossible) you must not reproach those 
who have decided in favor of it with lacking either 
sincerity or a scientific spirit (for these two 
things are no longer in question), but only 
with willing differently from yourself. Such 
a reproach, surely, would be narrow and 
intolerant. 

Accordingly, if we are not of those privileged 
ones to whom God's reality has been made mani- 

1 Ernest Martin : La Foi chrdtiervne est-elle un parti- 
jyris? Lausanne, 1892. 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 185 

fest through mystical experiences, thanks to their 
having a subconsciousness peculiarly permeable 
to His influence, we are not for that reason de- 
prived of all religion: there remains the religion 
of the will. When vision fails us we have the 
right to believe, that is, resolutely to choose in 
favor of the existence, behind all the scientifi- 
cally insoluble riddles of this world, of a spiritual 
principle at work in the universe, — a power whose 
triumph we hope for. It matters little what name 
we give to it. What does matter is that we should' 
be faithful to this principle in all our thought 
and conduct. Whenever the occasion arises in 
which the existence or the non-existence of God 
would bear importantly on our decision, it should 1 
be upon the first alternative that we take our 
stand. There is no lack of such occasions: at 
every hour of the day, James said, life confronts 
us with them and puts us to the proof, in the 
smallest things as in the greatest, in the realm 
of theory as well as in that of practice; and the 
responses which our conscience makes to them, 
our tacit consents and refusals, constitute the 
very touchstone both of our morality and also of 
our religion. 



184 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

Perhaps you will feel that for creatures as 
weak as we are, the will alone is a fragile and pre- 
carious base upon which to rear the religious life ; 
that we should need to be superlative heroes in- 
deed to believe blindly and without proofs. But 
this would be to forget two things: First, as I 
said above (p. 178), this gospel of voluntary faith, 
is not addressed, of course, to people who re- 
gard religion as a dead issue, but only to those 
for whom it is still a tenable hypothesis, which 
finds an echo in their own native aspirations, de- 
sires, and " reasons of the heart." It is not a 
question, then, of their believing in something 
which makes no instinctive appeal or is even re- 
pugnant to them, but simply a question of taking 
their stand for an alternative which, though it 
is not absolutely accepted by the intellect, ap- 
peals to them profoundly. This is why, although 
the effort required of them by religious faith is 
often difficult and sometimes heroic, it is never- 
theless nothing superhuman since it is the reply 
to an inner call which is already making itself 
heard, however feebly, in the depth of their na- 
ture. In the second place, we are so made that 
if belief expresses itself in deeds, deeds on their 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 185 

side engender and reinforce belief. 1 Habit be- 
comes second nature. Let yourself think and act I 
as if spiritual values were an illusion, moral ob- 
ligations and ideals merely fantastic, and you 
will soon find yourself more and more the slave I 
of your skepticism. On the contrary, said James, 
make every day a small sacrifice to " God," and 
to " Duty," and soon these two words, unsub- 
stantial as they at first appeared to you to be, 
will be transformed into living realities. The act 
of voluntary faith, upon being repeated, tends to i 
produce a state of faith which is the beginning of 
sight; and religion, from being at first a simple 
hypothesis, accepted and practised as a parti 
pris, ends by illuminating one's whole existence, 
and bringing with it the intimate evidence and 
joyous conviction of its truth. This does not 

1 1 recall, in passing, that in James's psychology (as also 
in certain respects in Renouvier's) the terms Will, Belief, 
Reality are correlative and intimately connected. James 
has shown that the various processes designated in ordinary 
life by such terms as to pay attention, to believe, to will, 
to perceive a reality, are essentially identical and always 
consist in the firm and unshakable retention in the focus 
of consciousness, and at the cost of a more or less consid- 
erable mental effort, of an idea, image, or other psychic 
datum, until it prevails and dominates our thought and 
conduct, 



186 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

mean, however, that we may dispense with effort, 
energy, and perseverence on our own part, for 
these constitute our own necessary contribution 
toward the development of our religious life. 

James's famous essay on the " Will to Be- 
lieve " and all his other writings are filled with 
the idea of the profoundly active and voluntary 
nature of religious faith. He has been most un- 
justly reproached, sometimes even by psycholo- 
gists, 1 with having, in his Varieties of Religious 
Experience, misunderstood and caricatured true 
piety by representing it as a nervous disease. It 
is true that if one read certain chapters of this 
work superficially, one might sometimes think 
that the author made all religion turn on mystical 
experiences which spring from the subconscious 

1 Although William James, says Stanley Hall, is perhaps 
the most brilliant litterateur and stylist in philosophy since 
Schopenhauer ... his method (in the psychology of re- 
ligion) seems to do violence to fact. " Most of the cases 
and experiences which constitute so large a part of his 
volume are abnormal and some teratological, from which 
true religion, I believe, saves its followers. These patho- 
logical varieties of religious experience can explain piety 
itself no more than the mental and physical freaks of 
hysteria explain true womanhood, the Wiertz Museum ex- 
plain art, or the effects of music on the insane show its 
real nature." (Stanley Hall: Adolescence. New York, 
1904, Vol. II, pp. 292-293, note.) 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 187 

and overwhelm the subject; and since it is among 
the psychopathic cases that these obsessive phe- 
nomena are most marked, it is from them that 
James has taken his most striking examples, mor- 
bid though they are. This explains the some- 
what unfavorable impression that this volume has 
made upon some readers. " It is enough to dis- 
gust one with religion," said one, " to have it 
represented by such a collection of abnormali- 
ties." 

These criticisms are, as a matter of fact, but 
a further testimony to James's sincerity and ex- 
actitude of observation. For it was no fault of 
his if as a matter of fact the authentic religious 
life, empirically attested by heroic virtues and 
all the marks of holiness which it confers, some- 
times develops in degenerate temperaments, even 
as the most beautiful flowers sometimes grow on 
the dunghill. When James cites cases which his 
scandalized readers would have referred straight 
to the hospital or the insane asylum, it is because 
he knew enough to make the distinction, which 
escapes them, between the pure diamond of re- 
ligious experience and its matrix, so to speak, 
which is often pathological. Furthermore, even 



188 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

in the volume in question (which, after all, shocks 
only by reason of its broad impartiality and its 
rare comprehension of the most diverse types of 
mind) one finds James's fundamental idea every- 
where implied and in the last pages explicitly 
stated: this is that the essence of religion lies 
in the will. For in all his cases he has insisted 
on the condition that those who, whether balanced 
or unbalanced, have had revelations from on high, 
shall have responded with some act of obedience, 
of personal and practical renunciation, or of vol- 
untary self -surrender ; without which they would 
not have been, in James's eyes, true religious ex- 
amples. 

We may then say in summing up that, with or 
without mystical experiences, it is invariably the 
inner resolve of the individual, his consecration 
to ideal realities, his obstinate prejudice in favor 
of the divine, in short, it is the will to believe 
which constitutes for James the very essence of 
religious faith and true piety. 



XI 

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 

In order to enter truly into a philosopher's 
thought, said James, it is less necessary to know 
the details of his system than it is to grasp his 
point of view, and see with his vision. This is 
very true. But if it is never easy to put one's 
self in another's place, it becomes particularly 
difficult when this other is so rich, complex, and 
unusual a personality as William James. His 
mind and heart worked so thoroughly in harmony 
that he should have attained, one feels, an equally 
harmonious vision of things and one, therefore, 
which it would be easy to describe. But the 
things themselves are so transitory, chaotic, and 
difficult to comprehend in one view, save at the 
cost of arbitrary simplification, that the more 
penetrating and sincere the onlooker is, the more 
he is struck by the complication of the spectacle, 
and the less likely he is to arrive at a truly syn- 
thetic vision of reality. This is the case with 
189 



190 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

James. One might say, allusively, that his phi- 
losophy no more constitutes a sys-tem, that is 
to say an ensemble of organically articulated 
ideas, than the world constitutes a uni-verse, that 
is to say an ensemble of realities combined into a 
coherent whole. 

In James's vision of things, two aspects can be 
distinguished: on the one hand his popular phi- 
losophy (I mean his altogether moral and re- 
ligious manner of looking at life and the world) 1 ; 
on the other his opinions as a professional 
philosopher on the problems of methodology 
and metaphysics. Let us consider the latter 
first: 

I. In his more technical writings, the point of 

view has gradually changed with time, or rather 

progressed steadily in one direction, and that is 

toward an ever more radical empiricism. At 

1 One must not misunderstand the expression " popular 
philosophy." It does not mean, in connection with James, 
philosophy cheapened, adapted to the masses and more or 
less distorted; but simply philosophy cleared of technical 
subtleties and so presented that every one can understand 
and live by it. Now since, for James, immediate experience 
is much more true and real than the generalizations of the 
armchair philosophers, it follows that for him popular 
philosophy is the genuine philosophy, the only one that 
humanly and seriously counts. 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 191 

the outset of his career — when the study of Re- 
nouvier freed him from the superstitions of de- 
terministic monism — while retaining his prefer- 
ence for the concrete method of immediate expe- 
rience, he for some time shared the firm belief 
of the French philosopher in the value of pure 
logic and the certainty of conclusions founded 
on the principles of identity and contradiction. 1 
But little by little his inborn distrust of every- 
thing abstract, purely deductive, and incapable 
of verification, got the upper hand, and we have 
seen that he finally gave up the desire to get a ra- 

1 For instance, since every number is finite, Renouvier 
concluded that it is contradictory and consequently im- 
possible for the past to be infinite either in time or in 
number of details; from which results the conclusion that 
it has not always existed, but that it sprang from noth- 
ingness at a certain moment. And if it was created by 
God, it is by the same logical necessity certain that God, 
too, has not been always existent in the past, but that He 
at some time began to exist. (Eternity, in the future, on 
the contrary, offers no difficulty since its infinity is never 
achieved, but consists in a series of moments which increases 
indefinitely, and this implies no contradiction.) This "prin- 
ciple of number," from which it follows that the com- 
pleted infinite is contradictory , as Renouvier said, plays a 
fundamental role in all the reasonings of this thinker. See, 
for instance, the excellent little work on Renouvier by Ph. 
Bridel: Charles Renouvier et sa philosophie. Lausanne, 
1905. 



192 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

tional or unified comprehension of the data of ex- 
perience, but confined himself to ascertaining what 
these data are (see pp. 107-108). This was not 
destined greatly to modify his vision of reality; 
which appeared to him as only the more extraor- 
dinarily abundant and diversified, defying all the 
rigid and closed systems of intellectualist phi- 
losophers by its inexhaustible richness and its 
perpetual creation of novelty. The only differ- 
ence is that while he had previously believed one 
could successfully comprehend it by the necessary 
laws of thought, just as Renouvier believed, he 
now saw that just this is impossible/that our con- 
cepts are unable to seize the real becoming of 
things, and that' these overwhelmingly transcend 
the power of logic. We cannot dream of confin- 
ing them in any theoretical formula, and the only 
way of getting at them is to plunge directly into 
the living flux of experience. 

This renunciation of every effort to grasp 
reality by logic seems to have had the effect of 
still further emancipating James's spirit. One 
might say that he had glimpsed the possibility of 
reconciling, on the common ground of immediate 
experience, philosophical doctrines which had 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 193 

seemed to him, until then, absolutely incom- 
patible. 

Allow me, apropos of this, to give a recollec- 
tion which may interest some of you, for it con- 
cerns a remark which James made over twenty 
years ago about the great philosopher, Charles 
Secretan. He, as you know, was a worthy 
brother-in-arms of Renouvier in the defense of 
free-will and the rights of the moral life, in the 
midst of the materialistic and positivistic current 
of the second half of the nineteenth century. But 
there was a great difference between them. Edu- 
cated in the school of mathematics, Renouvier 
brought to these philosophical questions a se- 
verity and dryness which often repelled the deeply 
religious and likewise mystical mind of Secretan. 
Nothing shows this better than their difference 
upon the fundamental principle of ethics, which 
was for Renouvier justice, and for Secretan love. 
At the level which these two lofty thinkers had 
reached it amounted to practically the same 
thing, for love and justice upon such a plane 
imply each other, as two inseparable aspects of 
one ideal ; so that there was actually nothing but 
a question of words between them. Yet how in- 



194 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

dicative this was of their temperamental differ- 
ences ! To take one further example : when Re- 
nouvier demonstrated by his principle of number, 
that God had begun to exist at a given moment, 
previous to which there had been nothing at all, 
Secretan was scandalized by such a rigorous ap- 
plication of logic to the Supreme Being, and 
dissented utterly, preferring to think of the om- 
nipotence of God as enshrouded in the inscruta- 
ble mystery of first things. 

To return to James, I once brought to his 
attention a critical study which Secretan had just 
published on the philosophy of Renouvier, 1 and 
after reading this criticism James made the fol- 
lowing comments : " I am much obliged to you 
for the paper by Secretan. ... It is much 
too oracular and brief, but its pregnancy is a 
good example of what an intellect gains by grow- 
ing old: one says vast things simply. I read it 

1 Ch. Secretan: Note sur le Neo-Criticisme. Lausanne, 
1892. (Reprinted from the Recueil inaugural de VUni- 
versiti de Lausanne.) In 1892, as James, after having spent 
the summer in Switzerland, was leaving with his family for 
the Italian lakes, and Florence, I sent him the reprint that 
I had just received. A few days later (September 18, 
1892) he wrote from Pallanza the letter from which I here 
quote. 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 195 

stretched on the grass of Monte Motterone, the 
Righi of this region, just across the lake, with 
all the kingdoms of the Earth stretched before 
me, and I realized how exactly a philosophic 
Weltansicht resembles that from the top of a 
mountain. You are driven, as you ascend, into a 
choice of fewer and fewer paths, and at last you 
end in two or three simple attitudes from each 
of which we see a great part of the Universe 
amazingly simplified and summarized, but no- 
where the entire view at once. I entirely agree 
that Renouvier's system fails to satisfy, but it 
seems to me the classical and consistent expres- 
sion of one of the great attitudes, that of insist- 
ing on logically intelligible formulas. If one goes 
beyond, one must abandon the hope of formulas 
altogether, which is what all pious sentimentalists 
do; and with them M. Secretan, since he fails to 
give any articulate substitute for the " Criti- 
cism " he finds so unsatisfactory. Most philoso- 
phers give formulas, and inadmissible ones, as 
when Secretan makes a memoire sans oubli = 
duratio tota simul = eternity! " You see how 
squarely and positively William James at this 
time rejected Secret an's strictures on Renou- 



196 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

vier's logical rigor. 1 What a change there 
was between that time and the day, sixteen 
years later, when he publicly repudiated this 
same method of Renouvier in his lectures at 
Oxford. 

The volume containing these Oxford lectures 
shows many a sign of this conciliatory tendency, 
which became more marked the more he became 
the convinced champion of immediate experience, 
and the more completely he rejected the concep- 
tual method as incapable of rendering an account 
of the actual flux of things. Even the change of 
title which this volume 2 underwent in being trans- 
lated into French is characteristic in this re- 
spect. Before the Oxford idealists, those ardent 
champions of the Absolute, James wished to ex- 

1 Nevertheless this did not at all prevent James from 
keenly appreciating the moral and religious inspiration of 
Secretan, since he quoted from him four years later (1896) 
his formulation of the fundamental religious hypothesis: 
Religion " says that the best things are the more eternal 
things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe 
that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final 
word. * Perfection is eternal ' — this phrase of Charles 
Secretan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation 
of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be 
verified scientifically at all." (The Will to Believe, New 
York, 1903, p. 25.) 

a d Pfamlwtic Universe. New York, 1909, 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 197 

pound his pluralistic conception of the universe 
clearly and persuasively; hence the original title 
— A Pluralistic Universe: but, in fact, what 
he discovered in them turned out to be not so 
much their monism as their intellectualism, their 
hollow rationalistic method. In contrast to 
this, therefore, he decided to lay more emphasis 
than he had originally planned on the only philo- 
sophical method whicfi he recognized as valid, — 
the appeal to concrete experience : hence the later 
title in French — Philosophie de I 'experience? 
It is significant that in his concluding paragraphs 
he appears to have become indifferent, whether 
the conclusions to be drawn by his hearers are 
going to favor monism or pluralism, provided 
that they are based on the concrete facts of 
life. 2 

The same characteristic stands out in the sym- 
pathetic manner in which James came latterly to 
interpret Hegel, the philosopher who formerly 

1 Published in Paris, 1910. 

2 ". . .if you can gather philosophic conclusions of any 
kind, monistic or pluralistic, from the 'particulars of life, 
I will say, as I now do say, with the cheerfullest of hearts, 
1 Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, but ring the 
fuller minstrel in.'" {A Pluralistic Universe, p. 331.) 
Compare above, p. 24, note. 



198 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

had irritated him most. Unquestionably Hegel's 
dialectic always seemed to him a deplorable in- 
tellectual aberration, but an aberration which he 
now indulgently looks on as a simple perversity 
of expression behind which is hidden a true and 
profound vision of a changing reality, a lively ap- 
preciation of that perpetual becoming in which 
things are so often transformed into their con- 
traries. Likewise when James becomes enthusi- 
astic about two thinkers who are as different from 
each other as Fechner 1 and Bergson, it is because 
he has been captivated by their intuitive and con- 
crete way of seeing, so rich, so full of facts, in 
short so " thick," that he was led to overlook 



1 G. T. Fechner (1801-1887) had been long known to 
James as the founder of psychophysics, that science which 
seeks to measure the intensity of sensations in terms of 
their stimuli. James never had set great value upon this 
kind of research, whose exactitude he admired but which 
he looked upon as rather useless and without interest for 
a psychology of any but the most pedantic sort. It was 
much later, in fact only a few months before his lectures 
at Oxford, that he paid more careful attention to the 
philosophic works of Fechner, and became straightway 
enthusiastic over them. He wrote me on January 3, 1908, 
" I have just read the first half of Fechner's Zend Avesta, 
a wonderful book, by a wonderful genius. He had his 
vision and he knew how to discuss it, as no one's vision ever 
was discussed." 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 199 

many of their metaphysical tendencies which 
were but little in harmony with his own. 

In fine, one feels that James became more and 
more indulgent towards all possible philosophies, 
so long as they were anti-rationalistic and were 
derived, not from intellectual abstractions, but 
from contact with life and from the vital depths 
of personal experience. 

Perhaps this is the place to say a word con- 
cerning the intellectual relationship between 
James and Bergson. It has often been pointed 
out that a striking analogy exists between the 
radical empiricism of the former and the intui- 
tionism of the latter, — especially in the concep- 
tion of consciousness as a continuous stream con- 
stituting reality itself, but one which the intellect 
distorts for practical ends by solidifying it and 
cutting it up into distinct and static fragments. 
In regard to this fundamental similarity, the 
question of priority has been very unwisely raised, 
and certain French writers have gone so far as 
to say that Bergson had preceded James in this 
new way of looking at things. They have even 
asserted that " Bergson's very original philoso- 
phy is not without affinity with that of William 



200 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

James and C. S. Peirce, but far from being de- 
rived from them it preceded them." 1 Heaven 
preserve me from my friends ! Bergson must 
have exclaimed when he read this, for it is hard 
to see how the Bergsonian philosophy, which was 
first advanced in 1889, 2 can have preceded the 
ideas which Peirce had published more than ten 
years before, and translated in the Revue Philo- 
sophique of January, 1879. And as for James 
it is true that his great work 3 appeared one 
year later than Bergson's book, but to cite this 
fact as has lately been done 4 in order to dispute 
his priority is to forget his earlier writings, nota- 
bly his celebrated article of 1884, 5 which already 
contained all the essentials of his theory of the 
stream of consciousness. (Some persons have 
even thought they recognized the germ of Berg- 
son's Donnees immediates in this article; but 

1 J. Bourdeau: Nouvelles modes en Philosophic Feuille- 
ton in the Journal des Dibats, Feb. 26, 1907. 

2 H. Bergson: Essai sur les Donne" es immidiates de la 
Conscience. Paris, 1889. 

8 W. James: The Principles of Psychology. New York, 
1890, 2 vols. 

4 A. Chaumeix: "William James." Revue des Deux 
Mondes of Oct. 15th, 1910, p. 850. 

6 W. James: "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psy- 
chology. Mind,, Vol. IX, pp. 1-26 (Jan., 1884). 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 201 

Bergson has categorically denied having known 
about this article when he prepared his book. 1 ) 
As a matter of fact, then, the priority by sev- 
eral years belongs indisputably to James. 2 

But how idle to raise a question of this sort 
in connection with two such philosophers ! What 
would it matter if Bergson had been inspired by 
the subconscious memory of James's articles? 
Many others have read them and their reading 
seems to have borne little fruit. In philosophy 
it is the ground on which seeds fall that largely 
counts, for seeds are everywhere and after all 
a seed is not the full-grown tree. And let us not 
forget, after all, that James (who concerned him- 
self with questions of priority only in order to 
give others their just dues) 3 made a handsome 

1 Cf. Revue Philosophique, t. LX ? p. 229, note (Aug., 
1905). 

2 H. M. Kallen: William James and Henri Bergson. Chi- 
cago, 1914, p. 38 et seq. 

3 There are authors who almost never cite their prede- 
cessors; so that they appear to have derived from their 
own inner consciousness all the ideas which they propound 
— prolem sine matre creatam. James went to the other 
extreme. With excessive scrupulousness he always names 
the persons from whom he thinks he may have borrowed 
anything, so that the notes at the foot of his pages are a 
perfect repertoire of the best that has been published on 
the subject he is treating. 



202 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

acknowledgment to Bergson for stimulation and 
encouragement toward taking the last step in 
the direction of anti-intellectualism. 1 

Now, would James have followed his colleague 
of the Institute further than this point of method, 
and have embraced the Bergsonian metaphysics 
entire? We do not know. But it is doubtful, for 
it is hard to see how, without self-contradiction, 
James could have accepted the essentially mon- 

1 Cf. A Pluralistic Universe. New York, 1909, Chapter 
VI, " Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism." Here 
James states that it was Bergson's philosophy which " had 
led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic method 
and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of 
what can or cannot be." A few quotations from James's 
letters will show with what delight he had read Bergson's 
books, and what an important place he attributed to them 
in the anti-rationalistic movement of contemporary thought. 
On Jan. 27th, 1913, he writes, " I have been re-reading 
Bergson's books [Donne' es immtdiates, Matttre et mtmoire], 
and nothing that I have read since years has so excited 
and stimulated my thought. ... I am sure that that 
philosophy has a great future; it breaks through old 
cadres and brings things into a solution from which new 
crystals can be got." And on Oct. 4th, 1908, when he had 
received, in London, a visit from Bergson: "So modest and 
unpretending a man, but such a genius intellectually! I 
have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he 
has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the 
present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history 
of philosophy. So many things converge towards an anti- 
rationalistic crystallization. Qui vivra verral " 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 203 

istic conception implied in the " elan vital origi- 
nel " from which Bergson believes the whole uni- 
verse arises by the differentiating process of evo- 
lution. 1 Nothing could be more contrary to that 
conception of the universe which James always 
held ; he believed in a primordial chaos with- 
out trace either of unity, order, harmony, or 
law; a maelstrom of independent forces and sep- 
arate beings which, although fortuitously related, 
come to be organized into a world of increasing, 
although never completed, harmony and coher- 
encey This is the idea which James set forth 
again a few months before his death in connection 
with the disconcerting psychic phenomena pro- 
duced by mediums such as the celebrated Eusapia 
Palladino : 

3 See Bergson's L'Evolution crSatrice (Paris, 1907), 
passim: "La vie, depuis ses origines, est la continuation 
d'un seul et meme elan qui s'est partage entre des lignes 
devolution divergentes. . . . Uilan originel est un 4lan 
commun; plus on remonte haut, plus les tendance? 
diverses apparaissent comme, complementaires les unes des 
aiitres. . . . L'harmonie ou plutot la complementaritS 
tiennent dt, une identite d'inipulsion." The expressions I 
have omitted to italicize clearly betray the monism which 
6eems to me to be the foundation of Bergson's thought, 
in spite of the indeterminism which it seeks to introduce 
into cosmic evolution. 



204 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

" If , . . . ," said he, 1 " one takes the theory 
of evolution radically, one ought to apply it not 
only to the rock-strata, the animals and the 
plants, but to the stars, to the chemical elements, 
and to the laws of nature. There must have 
been a far-off antiquity, one is then tempted to 
suppose, when things were really chaotic. Little 
by little, out of all the haphazard possibilities of 
that time, a few connected things and habits 
arose, and the rudiments of regular performance 
began. Every variation in the way of law and 
order added itself to this nucleus, which inevitably 
grew more considerable as history went on; while 

1 W. James: "Final Impressions of a Psychical Re- 
searcher," in Memories and Studies. New York, 1911, pp. 
192-193. We know that James for twenty-five years took 
an active interest in what is to-day called psychical re- 
search. To him is due the discovery and the first study 
of the celebrated Boston medium, Mrs. Piper. Spiritual- 
ists often cite James among their authorities, although 
unjustifiably, since he never adhered to their doctrines. 
He simply entered his protest against those who deny a 
priori the existence of these strange phenomena. He be- 
lieved in opening wide the door to all hypotheses, spiritist 
and other, while waiting for future researches to throw 
light on a class of facts from which we can at present 
conclude nothing with certainty, unless it be that our uni- 
verse is infinitely more complex and rich in unexplored 
regions than is suspected by the so-called scientific 
philosophy of our day. 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 205 

the aberrant and inconsistent variations, not be- 
ing similarly preserved, disappeared from being, 
wandered off as unrelated vagrants, or else re- 
mained so imperfectly connected with the part 
of the world that had grown regular as only to 
manifest their existence by occasional lawless in- 
trusions, like those which " psychic " phenomena 
now make into our scientifically organized world. 
On such a view, these phenomena ought to remain 
" pure bosh " forever, that is, they ought to be 
forever intractable to intellectual methods, be- 
cause they should not yet be organized enough 
in themselves to follow any laws. . . ." 

Doubtless too much importance should not be 
attached to this cosmogony which James 
sketches in passing, apropos of these special phe- 
nomena. This sketch shows us, however, the 
manner in which, in his estimation, reality un- 
folds: it passes from a primordial pluralistic 
chaos toward an ever-growing state of union 
and harmony; which is just the reverse of the 
Bergsonian universe. The latter starting from 
an original harmonious unity, moves on along 
diverging lines of evolution toward an ever- 
increasing dispersion, like the spray from a jet of 



206 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

water, to use the French philosopher's favorite 
comparison. It would be difficult to imagine, 
then, two visions of the course of things more 
opposed than those of James and Bergson, — with 
the exception of their common conviction (im- 
portant, it is true, from the point of view of 
method) that the reality of this " becoming," this 
unceasing creation of the new, is inconceivable 
by our logical thought and must be apprehended 
directly from immediate experience. 

I would add that in these same " Impressions " 
of a psychical researcher which I have just cited, 
another widespread mediumistic phenomenon — 
automatic writing and automatic rapping — leads 
James to a very different theory from the pre- 
ceding, namely, that of a cosmic reservoir of dif- 
fuse consciousness which is eager to manifest it- 
self, and which perhaps connects with the indi- 
vidual subconsciousness of the medium in such a 
way as to produce the appearance of a parasitic 
daemon, which spiritualists take for a spirit of the 
dead. Although James gives these two theories 
on successive pages, he does not attempt to con- 
nect them, and we have here another example of 
his typical and splendid indifference to whatever 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 207 

incoherences or contradictions appeared among 
theories provisionally suggested by different 
groups of phenomena. This he preferred to limit- 
ing his vision to the more obvious range of easily 
explained facts. No thinker knew better than 
James how to guard himself against the false ideal 
of unity-at-any-cost, which besets philosophers, 
and so often causes them to distort the actual 
reality by stretching it on the Procrustean bed 
of a rigid system. But this absolute respect for 
concrete experience, changing, overflowing, and 
never ending, necessarily prevented his settling 
upon a precise metaphysical doctrine, which once 
formulated would have been felt by him to be a 
hindrance to all further movement of thought. 

II. If James changed and did not appear to 
settle definitely the special problems that interest 
professional philosophers, the case was quite dif- 
ferent in all that he called popular philosophy, 
which was after all, to his pragmatic eyes, the 
only important one, the one by which we live, and 
the one which it is the sole business of all other 
philosophies to support and fortify. Here he 
never changed, save in details of form and expo- 
sition. Here we find him quite the same through 



208 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

his whole career, from the first article that ap- 
peared under his name to the closing pages of 
his posthumous work. 1 To him we are free beings 
in spite of the chains of heredity, education, and 
habit which bind us ; the universe of which we are 
a part, at present a sorry mixture of good and 
bad, is an unfinished reality in process of crea- 
tion, to whose destiny we contribute by our vol- 
untary moral and religious attitude; finally, this 
confident attitude is the only one to which we are 
truly conformed, because it alone enables us to 
support the tragedies and appreciate the joys 
of life. 

Such a vision of the world is indeed what one 

1 I refer to an article on " Faith and the Right to Be- 
lieve," published as an appendix to his posthumous volume, 
Some Problems of Philosophy (New York, 1911, pp. 221- 
231). Since 1868 James had written numerous review 
articles, but always anonymously. The first article which 
appeared under his name is his letter to Renouvier's Cri- 
tique Philosophique (Jan. 24th, 1878), entitled " Quelques 
considerations sur la me'thode subjective." He there estab- 
lishes, as against Huxley and positivism, the complete 
logical justification of faith as a means of realizing its 
object and of shaping the course of events. It is a sin- x 
gular coincidence, and most significant of the constancy of 
James's moral attitude, that these, his first and last signed 
works, should have the same essential purport, that is, the 
aflirmation of the right to believe and of the important 
influence of faith on the destinies of the universe. 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 209 

might expect of a thoughtful and exquisite nature 
whose sympathy was evoked by everj^thing that 
lives, and which at the same time possessed 
abounding energy and was impatient of all arbi- 
trary restraints, especially those that have been 
short-sightedly imposed, in the name of science, 
upon our feelings, activities, and natural faith. 
The so-called scientific deterministic monism 
would not suffice for a man like William James, 
in whom rightness of heart, force of character, 
and independence of thought were remarkably 
combined. On the one hand, he felt the need of a 
community of aspiration with the central force 
which guides the universe; on the other, he was 
neither able nor willing to countenance the evil 
which he found on every hand, and he could not 
be in sympathy with a universe of which such re- 
volting things are the inseparable features. 
Hence the pluralistic conception which, although 
essentially religious, at first astonishes by run- 
ning counter to traditional prejudices, but which, 
upon reflection, is found to conform entirely to 
the most assured data of experience, and to the 
deepest needs of the human soul. 

James's philosophy rests entirely upon his 



210 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

psychology^ Now he was probably the greatest 
psychologist that has ever lived, and we cannot 
hope soon to see his equal. Indeed, I might per- 
haps have done better to take his psychological 
doctrines for the main subject of our discussion, 
instead of merely touching upon them here and 
there in passing. But here the remark must suf- 
fice that upon every branch of psychology which 
he took up, James has left the imprint of his 
originality and penetration. He transformed 
psychology by his analyses and theories of the 
perception of time, space, and reality; of the 
nature of emotion, the feeling of effort, of at- 
tention, volition, instinct, and reason ; of the con- 
stitution of consciousness with its focus and 
fringe, and its incessant transformations ; and of 
much else. It is only with the lapse of time that 
we shall be able to measure the full value and 
fecundity of his psychological method, and of the 
position which he took between the old spiritual- 
istic rationalism on the one hand, and the asso- 
ciations t and atomistic empiricism on the other. 1 

1 Gf., inter alia, E. Baudin's excellent article on La 
MSthode psychologique de W. James (Preface to William 
James: Prtcis de Psychologie, translated by Baudin and 
Berthier). 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 211 

From the psychological point of view James 
has not left behind him as yet a " school," in the 
classic sense of the term. Not only are schools 
no longer characteristic of our epoch, but fur- 
thermore James does not offer a system that has 
the rigid formulae and the complicated deductive 
adornments which are required to attract a 
crowd of awe-struck and disputatious disciples. 
For his philosophy consists more in an attitude 
which must be communicated by contact and 
.feeling, rather than through a doctrine which im- 
poses itself by reason of its convenient codifica- 
tion. 1 But, better than having founded a school, 
William James will remain one of the great 
prophets of moral and intellectual liberty in the 
history of thought, an apostle of the intense life 
and of personal faith, and a liberator from all 
systems which tend to stifle man's spontaneity 

1 To cite but one example of the elasticity and lack of 
formulation of James's philosophy, I will recall one critic 
who enumerated no less than thirteen pragmatisms. He was 
aptly answered that there were as many as there were 
individuals, and that pragmatism was none the worse for 
that. See A. O. Lovejoy: "The Thirteen Pragmatisms," 
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 
Vol. V, pp. 1-29 (Jan., 1908); and M. Meyer: "The Exact 
Number of Pragmatisms," ibid., pp. 321-326 (June, 1908), 



212 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

and spiritual development. He was one of those 
rare individuals who succeed in combining the two 
poles of our nature, the sense of the real and that 
of the ideal, into a truly organic synthesis. 

You will now understand, gentlemen, that it 
was not without a feeling of profound sadness 
that I accepted your request to take the place, 
this year at Sainte-Croix, of that incomparable 
lecturer, that man of genius and great-hearted 
friend who a few months ago, while still under- 
estimating the gravity of his illness, had so gen- 
erously agreed to take part at your reunion. It 
is the irony of fate that I should find myself in 
the chair which he. was to have occupied to-day. 
And it must be a sad disappointment for you to 
be hearing William James merely talked about, 
instead of actually seeing, hearing, and discussing 
freely with the man himself. Of course, we do not 
know what special theme he would have chosen 
for this address, but I can conjecture something 
of the drift of his discourse, and I well know that 
you would have derived from it the largest in- 
spiration to independence of thought, and to 
courage and confidence in the future, 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 213 

My young friends, he might possibly have said 
to you, you are at the age of grave doubts and 
of solemn decisions, when habits are formed for 
life and when the irrevocable choice is made be- 
tween the manifold possibilities which our com- 
plex natures put before us. Already you have 
had to choose your careers. Whatever they are, 
remember that nothing is attained without per- 
severance and effort, but that, on the other hand, 
impetuousness and anxiety in no wise hasten the 
harvest. Silently, day and night, the thoughts 
that are committed to* our nervous mechanism, 
like seeds, mature and ripen. Provided, then, that 
you are careful not to sow bad seed, and that 
you are faithful to your daily task, you may 
confidently let the rest take care of itself: some 
fine morning you will awake to the full mastery 
of your science or your art, to the possession of 
a competent understanding of your field and, in 
so far as it depends upon you, your success will 
be assured. Be of good courage, then, and do 
not fear life ! 

But material success is not everything, and 
besides, times of discouragement will come. In 
order to live and to grow, a man has need of a 



214 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

horizon larger than his own profession. Strive 
then to avoid narrowness, that deformity of the 
professional man; keep your interest in every- 
thing human and keep your sympathy for all no- 
ble causes, and above all for that preeminent 
cause which is concerned with the welfare of the 
universe itself, — I mean religion. And do not 
forget that the religious life is too complex and 
inexhaustible to be imprisoned in formulas, it 
stretches beyond us on all sides, and each one of 
us can attain to but a small portion of it. Con- 
sequently, be as respectful to the beliefs of others 
as you are jealous of your own freedom of 
thought. In religious faith, as everywhere else, 
one must be oneself, at once sincere and inde- 
pendent, modest yet intrepid. 

Nor is any one asked to believe more than he 
is able. If you are one of those favored persons 
who have felt the presence of God, treasure this 
priceless experience ; but do not imagine that^God 
cannot reveal Himself to others in a different 
fashion. If mystical experiences and religious 
emotions have been denied you, do not for that 
reason conclude that you and God are not to 
work together. He needs each one of us to coop- 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 215 

erate for the ultimate triumph of good, and for 
the welfare of the world. It is not our suscepti- 
bility to the " religious experience " (which de- 
pends in no way on our own choice), but it is our 
attitude of will (the most intimate and personal 
part of ourselves), our construing in a moral 
sense the duties and sacrifices which life imposes, 
which constitutes our most genuine means of com- 
munication with the spiritual essence of things, 
and our surest means of alliance with the divine 
will. If we listen for the promptings of con- 
science, if we follow our ideal intuitions, our 
course will become ever clearer to us, our strength 
will increase, and we shall end by feeling the 
divine realities themselves and finding ourselves 
numbered among the heroes who may be obscure, 
yet with whom the universe has to reckon, and 
who are the lords and masters of life. 

Of course there will be along this path of moral 
development many a setback and defeat. And in 
view of these tragic possibilities you should know 
in advance two facts. 

First, that it is a somber yet instructive thing 
to become acquainted with those abysses of an- 
guish and despair in which so many have foun- 



216 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

dered, and where so many young lives have ended 
in madness or suicide. No man would court such 
experiences, and yet those who have been through 
them and come out safely have penetrated depths 
of reality of which light and superficial minds 
have no conception; those alone know the true 
meaning of the solemn words, damnation, and re- 
demption. Those alone can sympathize with 
other unfortunate human beings who have drunk 
of this same cup. < 

And second, " just as our courage is so often 
a reflex of another's courage, so our faith is apt 
to be a faith in some one else's faith. We draw 
new life from the heroic example. The prophet 
has drunk more deeply than any one of the cup 
of bitterness, but his countenance is so unshaken 
and he speaks such mighty words of cheer that 
his will becomes our will, and our life is kindled 
at his own." * 

1 William James: Psychology (Briefer Course). New 
York, 1892, pp. 459-460. 



APPENDIX 

THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPE- 
RIENCE. 1 

The lamented Leon Marillier (who died in 
1901) wrote, a few years ago, in the Revue Phi- 
losophique, a very detailed analysis of the psy- 
chology of William James. 2 To-day he would 
have had to add an important chapter upon the 
further contributions of the great American 
thinker in a comparatively new field. Marillier, 
with his profound knowledge of religious mani- 
festations, would have been best qualified to ap- 
preciate and to praise James's new book. He 
would have rejoiced to see this essential aspect 
of human experience emerge from the conspiracy 
of silence so long maintained by most modern 

1 William James: "The Varieties of Religious Experi- 
ence." New York, 1902. This review appeared in the 
Revue Philosophique, Vol. LIV, pp. 516-527 (November, 
1902). 

a Vol. XXXIV, 1892, pp. 449-470 and 603-627, and Vol. 
XXXV, 1893, pp. 1-32 and 145-183. 
217 



218 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

psychologists, through the appearance of a mas- 
terly work in which it at last receives the consid- 
eration it deserves. 

This volume contains the two courses of Gif- 
ford Lectures which the author was invited to 
deliver on Natural Religion at Edinburgh, in 
1901 and 1902. 

James's intention, we learn from the preface, 
was to devote the first course to the strictly psy- 
chological study of " Man's Religious Appetites " 
and the second to the metaphysical question of 
" Their Satisfaction Through Philosophy." But 
the unexpected growth of the psychological mat- 
ter, as he came to write it out, resulted in the 
second subject being postponed almost entirely. 
In the last lecture of all he suggested briefly his 
own philosophical conclusions, and hoped to be 
able, at some later day, to put them in more 
amplified form. 

It must not be inferred that the contents of 
the actual work are confined to a dry description 
or classification of facts, addressed only to spe- 
cialists. For James is at all times both a keen 
psychologist and an extraordinarily original phi- 



APPENDIX 219 

losopher, and this fact, together with a delightful 
style, gives an absorbing interest to everything 
that comes from his pen. In this and other re- 
spects the book is a more than worthy successor 
to his earlier works. And no one who is interested 
in the phenomena of religion can read it without 
being on every page deeply sensible of the rare 
temper of the author's mind. / James's philosophi- 
cal originality lies not so much in the principles 
which he expounds, which are those of the most 
pronounced empiricism, as in his manner of ap- 
plying them, and of following them up with a 
fidelity, a detachment from prejudice and an 
audacity which lead him into regions that are 
never reached by the vulgar practitioners of ex- 
perimental philosophy, who are always prone, in 
spite of their noisy declaration of impartiality, 
to fall back into the old pedantic rutsj 

This independence of spirit appears from the 
very first chapter entitled " Religion and Neurol- 
ogy," in which James takes the bull by the horns 
and delivers a penetrating and in places a justly 
severe criticism of what he calls " medical mate- 
rialism." This last is the view, much in vogue 
at present, that religion is irretrievably compro- 



220 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

mised by the mere fact that those whose experi- 
ences in this realm have been at all pronounced 
(that is to say " religious geniuses," the saints, 
prophets, mystics, and other humble souls pos- 
sessed of a really personal and living faith) have 
generally exhibited symptoms of nervous insta- 
bility, peculiarities of conduct, hallucinations, 
etc. They have been, in a word, eccentrics or 
psychopaths, from which fact it has been inferred 
that the religious phenomenon is nothing but a 
nervous disease which is of interest pathologi- 
cally, but of no value in itself, and the very op- 
posite of that great human ideal for which it has 
been taken. 

James is so far from contesting the frequent 
combination of the religious genius and the psy- 
chopathic temperament, that he looks upon it 
rather as something quite natural and explicable. 
But he holds that to discredit the first by reason 
of the second is to confuse two entirely different 
questions, namely, the estimation of the value of 
things with the determination of their origin or 
cause. To make the origin the criterion of value 
has always been, it is true, a method dear to 
those prejudiced persons who take their ideas 



APPENDIX 221 

simply and solely from some authoritative source, 
ecclesiastical or traditional, without inquiring 
into either their content or their necessary conse- 
quences. But we have passed that stage, and 
the medical materialists are merely belated dog- 
matists, secularized theologues, when to-day they 
condemn certain phenomena of conscience and 
certain beliefs, on account of their morbid origin. 
To do this is not an empirical procedure. In 
science or politics we do not estimate a new idea 
or theory by the state of health of its author, 
but solely by its intrinsic value. We examine it 
for its direct utility and for its important im- 
plications. We ought to do the same in religion. 
The only criteria for a philosopher to employ 
in his criticism of religion are the wholly empiri- 
cal criteria of its internal value, firstly, for the 
man who possesses it (his immediate happiness, 
the illumination it sheds upon his inner life), and 
secondly, of its tangible effects on individual con- 
duct and collective progress. 

It is only in a later chapter (that upon the 
" Value of Saintliness ") that James enters into 
this appreciation of religion from the purely em- 
pirical point of view of its fruits. Before doing 



222 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

so, he found it necessary to review and describe its 
principal manifestations, including the morbid, 
which are often the most instructive. 

The domain of religion is so vast that in the 
second chapter (" Circumscription of the Topic ") 
the author limits his subject by discarding all 
that is institutional and social, and confining 
himself to the psychology of the individual, or 
in other words tracing religion to its very source 
in the original inner experiences of the great re- 
ligious souls. For it is from these springs that 
flows the imitative and somewhat second-hand re- 
ligion of the common herd. Now what does " re- 
ligion " mean for these exceptional personali- 
ties? The author very wisely does not waste 
time in searching for a theoretically satisfying 
definition of so complex a reality, but takes the 
term broadly as meaning the general attitude of 
the individual toward life and toward the uni- 
verse. Yet there are two characteristics without 
which James feels that this attitude cannot be 
called " religious." These are, on the one hand, 
seriousness, which excludes from the religious 
sphere any such irresponsible disposition as the 



APPENDIX 223 

" je-m 9 en-fichisme " of Renan ; and on the other 
hand, sympathy, a quality which is entirely lack- 
ing, for instance, in the pessimism of Schopen- 
hauer or the rebelliousness of Nietzsche. 

Always solemn and yet tender, the religious 
attitude presents otherwise innumerable diversi- 
ties, which can be divided into two great types, 
with certain transitional cases. 

1. " The religion of healthy mindedness," that 
is to say of optimism, sometimes instinctive and 
spontaneous, sometimes reflective and self-con- 
scious. For its possessors, evil is a more or less 
negligible quantity, and re-birth is a thing un- 
known. This is the " once-born " type. Rous- 
seau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the whole lib- 
eral movement in Christianity, Emerson, etc., be- 
long in this category ; but the example over which 
the author stops longest, by reason of its actual 
importance in Anglo-Saxon countries, is that 
of the sects which practise mental healing 
such as New Thought, Christian Science, and 
others. 

2. The religion of " the sick soul " is more 
complex. It begins with a tragic sense of sinful- 
ness, slowly invades the torn and troubled life, 



224 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

and finally transforms it through the dramatic 
process of conversion. This is the " twice-born " 
type. 

We cannot think of recapitulating here the 
six or seven lectures devoted to these subjects, 
nor indeed those on " The Reality of the Un- 
seen," on " Saintliness," or " Mysticism." All 
these essentially descriptive chapters abound with 
concrete facts and striking quotations from typi- 
cal cases. These James has drawn from the most 
remarkable autobiographies in literature, and 
from documents (such as those of Starbuck) that 
have been furnished by recent investigations. One 
does not know whether to praise the author more 
for the richness and extent of his information or 
for the admirable openness of mind and heart 
which enables him to understand, to appreciate, 
and indeed to love the many diverse manifesta- 
tions of the religious life, so long as they are 
genuine. 

James is free from any form of narrowness, as 
much from that which afflicts many so-called en- 
lightened and scientific minds as from that of 
bigoted fanatics. And this breadth does not pro- 
ceed from any remoteness or indifference on his 



APPENDIX 225 

part, for clearly he feels that the soil turned up 
by him is sacred ground, and that there is no 
event in which a human being is more personally 
involved, or more directly and immediately re- 
vealed, than in the religious experience. This 
same lively sympathy which enables him to enter 
so intimately into the souls of those whom he 
studies is exhibited in many of James's previous 
essays. For he always deplored the appalling 
lack of comprehension which the slightest tem- 
peramental or intellectual differences commonly 
suffice to put between beings who are, after all, 
of one mold. 1 



From the description of religious experience, 
one is inevitably led to its appraisal ; to the prob- 
lem of the value and significance of religion, 
whether from the empirical and biological or from 
the metaphysical and absolute point of view. We 
have already said that from the outset James's 
critical empiricism discarded, as methodologi- 
cally unjustifiable, the estimates offered by medi- 

1 Cf., the last two essays in Talks to Teachers on Psy- 
chology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals. New 
York, 1899. 



226 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM Jx\MES 

cal materialism, quite as much as those offered 
by the theological profession. It is not by its 
roots and origins (whether one assigns them to 
the pathological condition of the organism or to 
revelation from on high) that one can judge of 
the value of religion in general, or of a given re- 
ligion in particular, but only by its fruits, its con- 
sequences in the moral life of the individual and 
of humanity. This entirely practical and utili- 
tarian valuation of the religious life is often men- 
tioned by the author, and becomes the main theme 
of the fourteenth and fifteenth lectures, where he 
enters upon a critique of " The Value of Saintli- 
ness." 

Nowhere else, perhaps, has James displayed a 
more exquisite sensibility or a more admirable 
delicacy of touch, in his twofold task as psy- 
chologist and moralist than in his delineation of 
the great classic traits in the physiognomy of the 
saints, — devotion, charity, purity, asceticism, 
heroism, etc. After having shown the grandeur 
and the defects, and made allowance for what 
human frailty and stupidity inevitably add by 
way of alloy, James, still using his purely em- 
pirical method and with no rhetorical artifices, 



APPENDIX 227 

concludes with a eulogy of saintliness, which in 
power of persuasiveness and real eloquence leaves 
the verbose apologies of the theologians far be- 
hind. Not only does a genuine experience of 
religion incomparably enrich the individual him- 
self, — enlarging his vision and giving him 
strength, peace, and happiness, — but also it ac- 
celerates the evolution of humanity. The saints 
have indeed been the initiators of all moral prog- 
ress, the heralds of a perfected state of society. 
We cannot reproduce in a few lines the impression 
left by these pages, in which moral insight vies 
with closely reasoned argument, and in which, — 
after a striking comparison between Nietzsche's 
super-man and its complete antithesis, the saint, 
— saintliness emerges absolutely justified from 
the " economic point of view," as representing an 
ensemble of qualities which are indispensable to 
the welfare of the world. 

After this empirical justification of religion, 
there still remains the problem of its metaphysical 
value, and it is to this momentous question that 
James devotes his last chapters. 

All religions suppose that the visible world 



228 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

forms a part of a more spiritual universe and 
derives its deepest significance therefrom, and 
that our real duty is to adjust ourselves to this 
higher universe ; and further, that prayerful com- 
munion is a real means to that end, a truly 
efficacious act by which the spiritual energy of 
this other universe is brought to bear in our phe- 
nomenal world. But what are such beliefs worth ? 
Are they anything but a subjective impression, a 
pure illusion? Do they correspond to an objec- 
tive reality? 

The affirmative response to this question has 
always been along one of two different lines — * 
mysticism or rationalism. The first involves the 
religious experience as personally lived and at- 
tested, and this habitually brings conviction to 
the individual who practises it, making him in- 
vulnerable to all the attacks of skepticism. But 
it carries no weight with the individual who has 
not been privileged to have this personal experi- 
ence. The second line, that of intellectual rea- 
soning, has been followed by theologians and 
idealistic philosophers of every shade,, and like 
all intellectual processes, it would have the ines- 
timable advantage of giving universally valid re- 



APPENDIX 229 

suits, — if only it were successful! But no heavy 
artillery of Kantian dialectic is needed to demol- 
ish the beautiful rationalist demonstrations of 
religious truths, as say, the existence of God. 
One has only to look about one or to take a glance 
at history to see that the rational arguments of 
the ablest theologies and philosophies have never 
convinced anybody, and have appealed only to 
those who were already convinced by personal 
mystical experience. One must accordingly ac- 
knowledge the plain fact that there is no means 
of establishing rationally the objective validity 
of religious experience and its accompanying be- 
liefs: but neither is there any means of refuting 
them, or of proving that mystical phenomena do 
not put the individual in contact with a higher 
reality. 

Does this mean, then, that the understanding 
has no further place in this domain, and that 
thinking will not assist in solving religious prob- 
lems? Certainly not, says James, but one must 
assign this work of the intellect to its proper 
place which is only secondary, being a subsequent 
reflection upon the immediate data of experience. 
Religious philosophy must start from religious 



230 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

phenomena accepted as such, and be content with 
classifying and analyzing their contents ; in other 
words, from having been a theology that was 
metaphysical and a priori as it has hitherto been, 
it must become a critical and inductive science 
of religions. On such ground, it may hope some 
day to gain acceptance even by non-religious peo- 
ple, just as the facts of optics are acknowledged 
by those who are born blind. But just as optics 
would not exist were it not for the experiences 
of seeing individuals, in the same way the science 
of religions is based on the evidence afforded by 
religious persons; and it will never be in a posi- 
tion to decide whether in the end these experi- 
ences themselves are illusory or not. This last 
question of the objective and absolute sig- 
nificance of religious phenomena will be im- 
possible to solve scientifically, and it will al- 
ways be for the individual either to leave it 
open or else to settle it by an act of personal 
faith. 

James is among those who do not hesitate be- 
fore this act of faith, and who stand for the 
metaphysical value of religion. And if you 
should object that in so doing he departs from 



APPENDIX 231 

the ways of science and of experimental philoso- 
phy, and goes over to the arbitrary and the in- 
dividual, you would then find the " radical em- 
piricist " a very formidable opponent. For he 
is neither to be duped by words, nor to be de- 
ceived by the pontiffs of modern " science " as to 
what constitutes true empiricism. He has seen and 
felt, better than any one else, the fundamental 
opposition which separates the so-called scientific 
from the religious point of view, and which re- 
volves entirely about the question of personality 
and the reality of the Ego ; and he declares that 
on this point, despite all objections, the religious 
man stands on the ground of actual experience 
and the scientific philosopher upon that of theory 
and prejudice. No summary can begin to do 
justice to the vivid and masterly pages which 
the American thinker devotes to this all-impor- 
tant issue. 

In the religious experience the Ego itself is in 
question, and its personal relations to the higher 
spiritual world and indeed its very destiny are 
at stake. But our modern science tends precisely 
to suppress the Ego, to " de-personalize " man, 
and to make of him nothing but an ephemeral 



232 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

aggregate of sensations, a bubble of air, as it 
were, rising to burst at the surface of the cosmic 
whirlpool. And it is easy to perceive that from 
this point of view religion can be nothing but an 
anachronism, a survival of the animistic thought 
of the ignorant savage who personalizes every- 
thing. James recognized that, at first glance, 
there is a certain appearance of grandeur and 
magnanimity in this impersonalism of the scien- 
tific attitude; but he soon dispels this mirage 
with a single penetrating observation, — that the 
general ideas and cosmic conceptions upon which 
science rests are (as science herself admits) but 
pictures and symbols of reality, whereas the con- 
crete events and personal facts which make us 
what we are, are realities in the proper and most 
complete sense of the term. In considering " ob- 
jects," apart from the individual consciousness 
which thinks them, science makes use of an arti- 
fice which may for science have its special and 
momentary utility, but which none the less de- 
stroys that concrete and living status which is 
their only real one. " A conscious field plus its 
object as felt or thought of plus an attitude to- 
ward the object plus the sense of a self to whom 



APPENDIX 233 

the attitude belongs " constitutes, at least while 
it lasts, a solid piece of reality, an authentic 
fragment of what is. 

It is only from this sort of fragment, that is 
to say from personal states of consciousness, 
that we can form a conception as to what the 
elements of all real existence are. To imagine, 
as do the adepts of modern " science," that we 
have reality in the general laws and impersonal 
formulae of cosmic evolution, is like thinking that 
the photograph of an express train contains the 
energy and speed of the train, or like being con- 
tent, in place of dinner, with the reading of a 
bill of fare. Religion itself is deceived in no such 
manner ; it presents us with what are but crumbs, 
perhaps, in the shape of our poor little personal 
experiences, but they are at least real crumbs, 
the beginnings of a real repast, a substantial 
fragment of being. That is why it is not desert- 
ing experience, but is on the contrary rather 
holding to it, to prefer in philosophy religious 
personalism to scientific impersonalism. It is 
needless to say that what James is condemning 
is not the exact sciences, nor the true sci- 
entific spirit, but the so-called philosophy of 



234 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

science which has been illegitimately derived 
therefrom. 

Turning once more to religions, we find that 
notwithstanding their extreme diversity, they all 
affirm the same cardinal experience consisting of 
two phases: first, an unrest, a sense that some- 
thing is going wrong with oneself; second, deliv- 
erance from this unrest, salvation, attained by 
the identification of the self with something bet- 
ter, which on the one hand is a part of the self, 
and on the other infinitely transcends it. " When 
mystical activity is at its height," says M. 
Recejac in a passage quoted by James, " we find 
consciousness possessed by the sense of a being 
at once excessive and identical with the self: 
great enough to be God; interior enough to be 
me. The * objectivity ' of it ought in that case to 
be called excessivity, rather, or exceedingness." 
In other words, throughout the history of re- 
ligion man has come to feel the better part of 
himself in contiguity and continuity with an 
excess, a " more " of the same sort which is at 
work in the outer universe, and in which the in- 



APPENDIX 235 

dividual finds salvation when his inferior self has 
met disaster. 

All this is but a description of a psychological 
fact, or rather a summing up of what is com- 
mon to all, even the most diverse religious auto- 
biographies. The science of religions should 
mark this fact which, even were it a purely sub- 
jective illusion with no metaphysical truth, would 
nevertheless have a vast biological importance 
since the individual who passes through this ex- 
perience emerges from it with a real increase of 
moral force and a feeling of renewed life. But, 
returning to the problem that occupies us here, 
we find that it is entirely centered in the question 
of the real existence and nature of this excess, 
this more that is of a piece with our better self, 
and with which we believe that we are continuous. 
All religions, as James has so well shown, admit 
its reality, but they do not agree as to its nature, 
and it ought to be precisely the task of the science 
of religions to elaborate some hypothesis which 
should reconcile as far as possible the divergent 
interpretations, and mark the precise point where 
the irreconcilable divergences, that is to say, 
where the free individual " over-beliefs," begin. 



236 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

It is to the development of such an hypothesis 
and to a sketch of his own " over-beliefs " that 
James devotes the concluding, and certainly very 
absorbing, pages of the book. 

His hypothesis, — which has met with wide ac- 
ceptance, — consists in introducing the subliminal 
or subconscious self as an intermediary between 
the ordinary personality and the hidden spiritual 
world, in order to explain all the typical phe- 
nomena of the religious experience, and in par- 
ticular the sentiment of that more which is 
continuous with and at the same time transcends 
the conscious self. This secures a reconciliation 
between psychology, which now accepts the sub- 
liminal consciousness as a fact, and religion, 
which is left free to believe that the subliminal 
sphere is in its turn in touch with higher realities. 
These latter transmit their influences, more or 
less modified, through the subconscious to the 
conscious self. To put it differently: on the one 
hand, religious phenomena square with psy- 
chology under the rubric of automatisms or mani- 
festations of the subconsciousness, and on the 
other hand, it remains " literally and objectively 
true as far as it goes " that " the conscious per- 



APPENDIX 237 

son is continuous with a wider self through which 
saving experiences come" (p. 515). For the 
rest, since we are entirely ignorant of how far 
the subconscious self extends on the other side, or 
what its limits are, it is here that the individual 
over-beliefs come in to complete one's picture of 
this more. 

Let us consider briefly some of our author's 
own " over-beliefs." 

According to James, our being extends to an 
entirely different sphere or dimension of exist- 
ence from this world of the senses, but one that 
is no less real, since it can exercise an influence 
upon the latter ; in fact, when, through a state of 
faith or prayer, we enter into communion with 
this mystical or supernatural sphere (it little 
matters what name we give it), an actual change 
is effected in our finite personality, we are trans- 
formed into new men and our regeneration, trans- 
lated into conduct, produces practical conse- 
quences in the natural world. If we call 
this higher active reality God, we may say that 
God and we have business together, and that by 
yielding ourselves to His influence we attain our 



238 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

highest destiny. The course of the universe is 
modified where our personalities come in contact 
with it; and it goes well or ill according as each 
one of us fulfils or neglects what God requires 
of him. In fine, God is real since He produces 
real effects. 

These special and particular irruptions of a 
higher universe into the course of the natural 
world are, it goes without saying, inadmissible to 
so-called scientific naturalism, and even to the 
supernaturalism of most philosophers. For phi- 
losophers freely admit, above or beyond the veil 
of nature, an Absolute which is its first cause 
and ultimate significance, but they do not allow 
this species of constitutional monarch to partici- 
pate in any concrete events. All phenomena, 
according to these philosophers, equally and indif- 
ferently emanate from the Absolute which is re- 
vealed as a whole in the block-universe, but could 
not manifest itself in one event any more than 
in any other. James repudiates categorically 
this refined or universalistic supernaturalism of 
the idealistic philosophers, for he fails to see how 
it differs, for practical purposes, from the natu- 
ralism of the positivistic scientists ; and he classes 



APPENDIX 2S9 

himself without hesitation among what he calls 
the " crass " or " piecemeal " sapernaturalists, 
and admits that higher realities do intervene in 
certain events of this universe, even though it 
were only in God's answers to the inner prayer of 
man. With less than this, there could be no re- 
ligious life. 

There are, on the other hand, other widespread 
over-beliefs which attract James but little. The 
idea, for instance, that God (the real God with 
whom we have commerce through the mediation 
of our subconsciousness) is the creator or abso- 
lute governor of the universe, leaves him cold; 
and his philosophy, which is essentially pluralistic 
because it is radically empirical, also anti-pan- 
theistic, and anti-monistic, inclines him toward 
a kind of polytheism rather than toward the tra- 
ditional monotheism. The religious experience 
implies, indeed, simply communion with a being 
greater than ourselves, which gives us inner peace 
and the strength to live, but it does not guar- 
antee that being's infinity or absoluteness. It is 
the philosophers and monoideistic mystics with 
their infatuation for unity who have gone on to 
the notion of a single God, the creator, legisla- 



240 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

tor, and soul of the world. Neither does James 
commit himself in regard to personal immor- 
tality, 1 divided as he is between two tendencies 
which he finds equally vague and equally com- 
mendable, namely, the disinterestedness which 
consents confidently to entrust to others the com- 
pletion of our cherished ideals, and on the other 
hand the natural and lively desire to be present 
in person at their definitive triumph. He sees no 
objection to the possibility that in the end cer- 
tain parts of the universe should be lost or elimi- 
nated, and that the final harmonization should 
be realized only at the price of certain absolute 
sacrifices. This seems to be the only entirely 
practical solution that James finds for the prob- 
lem of evil (a problem, however, which he does 
not treat in detail), for he makes clear that all 
the optimistic explanations of it and all the at- 

1 Without affirming the reality of a future life — which 
he considered to be a question of fact which psychical 
research (phenomena of mediums, etc.) might some day 
clear up — James never ceased to defend its possibility 
against all who claimed in the name of science or philosophy 
to deny it. See, especially, the little volume in which he 
refutes the so-called objections drawn from cerebral physi- 
ology and other arguments: W. James: Human Immor- 
tality. (Ingersoll Lecture) Boston, 1898. 



APPENDIX 241 

tempts at theodicy impress him as very insipid 
performances. Evil is to him a reality, an ele- 
ment of the universe, which cannot be suppressed 
by shutting one's eyes to it, or by calling it a 
" lesser good." 

James's religious philosophy is characterized 
on the whole, as to method, by two intimately con- 
nected traits. First, it is empirical and always 
eager to take account of actually experienced 
facts, whatever they may be; for reality is far 
too rich and complex to be comprehended by a 
single individual, so that we can never expect 
every one to have the same religious experience 
or the same faith; and such diversity must be 
respected. And second, his philosophy is prac- 
tical, that is to say, utilitarian, and rejects as 
vain all speculation that has no bearing on life. 
James formulated this second point in the prin- 
ciple of " pragmatism," which he adopted from 
his compatriot, too little known in Europe, the 
philosopher Peirce; it maintains that all belief 
is but a rule for action, and that its significance 
is consequently measured by the difference it can 
make in our conduct. This does away, at one 



242 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

stroke, with a host of idle questions, beginning 
perhaps with the controversies over the meta- 
physical attributes of God, such as his aseity, 
his necessity, simplicity, immateriality, etc. ; for 
what difference does all this make to us and how 
could our conduct or our inner life be altered by 
the acceptance or rejection of such concepts? 
It is quite otherwise with the moral attributes of 
divinity, such as saintliness, justice, love, etc.; 
which react strongly upon us and whose signifi- 
cance and reality are guaranteed by their influ- 
ence on our conduct. 

His complete disdain of abstract metaphysics, 
and of ideas that have no practical bearing, 
makes James a typical representative of the 
genius of his race. Doubtless it was a similar 
inspiration, at bottom, which caused Kant to 
sweep aside all metaphysical lumber and to ad- 
mit, by way of religious speculation, only what 
could be justified as a " postulate of the practi- 
cal reason." But the older philosopher was un- 
able to rid himself of the cumbersome machinery 
of scholastic argumentation, and it remained for 
the clear and keen common sense of the Anglo- 
Saxon, free of all pedantry, to formulate and 



APPENDIX 243 

apply the pragmatic principle with a simplicity 
and ease, one might almost say with a good hu- 
mor, which make it instantly intelligible to read- 
ers unversed in dialectics. In this sense James is 
right in considering the tradition of English and 
Scotch analysts (of Locke, Hume, and the rest), 
to which he properly belongs, as representing far 
better than does the sage of Konigsberg (with 
the metaphysical excesses which he induced 
among his successors) the true critical method, 
— the " only method which can make of philoso- 
phy a discipline worthy of a serious man," and 
the only one which works at all effectively against 
dogmatism and fruitless ratiocination of every 
kind. 

To return to James's personal conclusions or 
over-beliefs, we have but to add to them the ele- 
ment of free-will, taken for granted in this vol- 
ume but often asserted and defended by him in 
his earlier writings, in order to see that the whole 
forms the most complete antithesis to the creeds 
advanced by the representatives of so-called mod- 
ern scientific philosophy. This doctrine consti- 
tutes a splendid defiance to all " scientific " sects, 



244 PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES 

whose pretense of being the guardians of truth 
James does not hesitate to stigmatize as humbug 
and bosh. 

This spectacle, of a psychologist of the first 
rank, at once a logician and philosopher and en- 
tirely abreast of the modern scientific movement, 
who is independent, moreover, of any dogmatic 
attachments, and who applies the empirical 
method exclusively and conscientiously, — rehabil- 
itating the cardinal points of natural religion 
and of " primitive thought " ; — this unusual spec- 
tacle will undoubtedly scandalize the loyal disci- 
ples of Haeckel, Spencer, and the other leaders 
of " modern thought." They may be counted on 
to oppose him vigorously. On the other hand, we 
venture to predict that he will encourage and 
inspire a host of open-minded contemporaries, 
who, from a false notion of what the scientific 
temper is, and despite their own inner prompt- 
ings, have too long let themselves be silenced by 
the edicts of monistic and deterministic natural- 
ism. 



INDEX 



Absolute, the, 33, 84, 87, 92, 

101, 126-7, 140-1, 144-6, 

238. 
Abstractions, 20-1, 24-9, 

157-8. 
Agassiz, Louis, 16-24. 
Annihilation, 132. 
Art versus science, 3-5. 
Bergson, Henri, 108, 198- 

203, 205-6. 
Block-universe, 34, 111, 238. 
Boutroux, Emile, 150. 
Chance, see Tychism. 
Christianity, 16, 149, 163-5. 
Consciousness, stream of, 4, 

72-4. 
Cosmic consciousness, 206, 

236-7. 
Co-terminousness of minds, 

107-9. 
Determinism, 32-7 (see also 

Monism). 
Dewey, John, 55-6. 
Ego, unity of, 70-1, 74, 

104-6. 
Empiricism, 3-12, 19-21, 23- 

5, 44-5, 90, 191-2, 231, 241. 
Error, 169-70. 
Evil, reality of, 15, 121-2, 

144-6, 209, 240-1. 
Experience, 6, 9, 27-8, 42, 

68-9, 76, 86, 89-98, 118, 

232-3. 
Faith, i71-6, 180-5, 208, 216, 

230. 
Fechner, G. T., 160, 198. 
Flux of reality, 98-9, 110-1, 

203, 206. 



Freedom of the will, 113- 

20, 124, 172, 243. 
God, 15, 136-43, 146-8, 151- 

3, 156-65, 194, 237, 239. 
Heroism, 128-32, 177. 
Immortality, 240. 
James, Henry, 13-4. 
Medical materialism, 219-21, 

225. 
Meliorism, 48, 121-33, 165, 

203-6, 208. 
Monism, deterministic, 31- 

43, 101-4, 111-7. 
Moralism, see Meliorism. 
Over-beliefs, 156, 176, 236-7, 

244. 
Panpsychism, 95. 
Pantheism, 139-44. 
Peirce, Charles S., 60-1, 199- 

200, 241. 
Philosophy, 23, 59, 166, 

190. 
Pluralism, 100-9, 124, 196. 
Polytheism, 160-2. 
Pragmatism, 28-30, 42, 44- 

67, 136, 211, 241-3. 
Progress, see Meliorism. 
Psychology, 5, 210, 217. 
Radical empiricism, 29, 68- 

99, 190. 
Rationalism, 68-9, 75, 87-9, 

168-9, 197. 
Reality, see Experience. 
Religion, 11, 134, 161-2, 174- 

6, 182, 185-8, 222-3, 229- 

30. 
Religious experience, 149-55, 

161-2, 178, 223-4, 234-5. 



245 



246 



INDEX 



Renouvier, Charles, 37-9, 90, 

112, 191-6. 
Royce, Josiah, 140-1, 144. 
Saintliness, 226-7. 
Salvation, 133, 142, 234. 
Secretan, Charles, 64, 193-6. 
Seriousness, 14-5, 35, 124, 

127, 222. 
Soul, 71, 106. 
Subconscious, the, 153-4, 206, 

236-7. 
Suffering, 10, 36, 145. 
Supernatural, the, 148-53, 

157, 238-9. 



Sympathy, 5-12, 132, 225. 

Theism, 134-65. 

Thought, function of, 28-9. 
45, 54-6, 135-6. 

Transitive states, 77-80, 91. 

Truth, 29, 55 t 57-8, 80-7, 
169-70. 

Tychism, 43, 110-20, 124. 

Varieties of Religious Ex- 
perience," "The, 11, 186, 
217-44. 

Vicious intellectualism, 26, 
37 108 

Will' to believe, the, 166-88. 



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